


Take Me to Your Room

by dynamicsymmetry



Series: Rising Through the Dark [4]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Aftercare, Banter, Dirty Talk, Dom/sub, Face Slapping, Face-Fucking, Facials, Finger Sucking, Fluff and Humor, Hair-pulling, Human Outsider (Dishonored), Impact Play, Light Bondage, M/M, Masturbation, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Porn with Feelings, Post-Game(s), Praise Kink, Romance, two adorable dopes stumbling bass-akwards into kinkiness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:08:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26763349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: Even as a god, the Outsider was still an unwilling prisoner. Now that he’s human and free, he’s discovering just how good it can feel to give control up to someone he trusts. Someone who loves him.Someone who will take him as far as he wants to go.
Relationships: Corvo Attano/The Outsider (Dishonored)
Series: Rising Through the Dark [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1388500
Comments: 7
Kudos: 35





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Makes sense that immediately after I finish one of the most fucked up fics I’ve ever written, I lunge back into this wholesome nonsense. If you haven’t read [When It’s Right It’ll Find You,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18651547) I strongly recommend doing so before proceeding here. 
> 
> I have no idea how long this is going to end up being; much like All Our Tomorrows, I’ll probably just keep adding to it as the mood strikes me. I don’t feel like it has an _end,_ per se, although there is a single progressive plot. Mostly I just wanted to take a deep dive into what discovering kink might be like for someone who’s been through what the Outsider has, and who’s found himself in a relationship this trusting and healthy. 
> 
> (I just realized that this is actually almost a twin in some ways to a whole other series I wrote in a whole other fandom that proceeds almost exactly along the same starting lines with a similar premise. Weird. Maybe I’m not very creative.)
> 
> Note: I want to stress that I am aware from personal experience that BDSM is not therapy and not everyone who does it is traumatized. Also in the real world it’s actually not a great idea to do something like this with someone without explicitly talking it over first. Even if you do trust them. 
> 
> Also also, in this chapter Corvo refers to sex workers in a very impolite manner at one point. I think Corvo would in fact be nothing but polite to sex workers. Apart from drugging them/choking them out/killing them, I mean.
> 
> Music note: Title comes from [“Take Me”](https://vimeo.com/91891144) by Sisyphus, which is also a mood-setter, and please know that the music video at that link is probably one of the most gorgeously sexy things I have ever seen and is NSFW because nipples.
> 
> Thanks so much for reading. I really hope you enjoy. ❤️

Looking back, it was there from almost the beginning.

He thinks about it. Before. During. After. It isn’t even really _thinking,_ because thought implies a degree of conscious intent; instead it merely comes. It emerges in his mind like rocks periodically appearing as the waves rush in and out, glistening and jagged and somehow beautiful. It’s a memory and it’s more than a memory, and it exists in the context of the bedrock to which it’s attached. A deeper thing, more fundamental, and moving as the continents move. Treacherous and ominous and potentially violent. If he’s honest it frightens him.

If he’s honest it all frightens him.

That might be why.

It didn’t start out overtly frightening, is the thing. It was instinctive and even easy once he allowed it to come, once he knew how. Flat on his back with Corvo braced over him, holding him down with thick and delightfully calloused hands, those hands everywhere and hungry. Practically manhandling him. A grating voice concealing a grin as it called him a slut. It stoked the heat in him, licked his insides with delicious flame. He was so hard he could barely stand it, moaning and arching and close to begging—for Corvo to take him. Use him.

Which happened. Those thick, calloused hands gripping him and fucking his mouth until his eyes stung with tears and the looming form straddling his chest blurred away, and all he wanted was more.

Even if he didn’t understand exactly what _more_ consisted of.

He did get it. In one way or another Corvo is frequently rough with him. Often gentle too, slow and sweet with whispers of adoration and love, and whatever lingering anger Corvo felt for him is long gone, but in the end they always come back to rough, to strong hands holding him down and doing what they please with him. He’s only ever desired it. Corvo has never forced him into anything and he knows he never would. He’s loved it, every second. It’s been _fun_.

But under all of it, in that bedrock—he’s always sensed it, even if he hasn’t been fully aware. Because he’s been badly hurt. Because he’s been forced into other things. Because he doesn’t recall a lot of his life before the Void, and what he has comes back to him in often confusing flickers and glimpses, but he knows it was lonely and painful and he wanted none of it, and in none of it did he have any choice, until the final cruelty that cut away his life and his name.

On some level he knows that the only reason he feels this way now is that it’s Corvo. And Corvo will never hurt him. Corvo will never allow him to come to harm. Not anymore. Corvo is the Protector and not only of Emily.

Never in either of his lives has he been so safe.

That doesn’t mean the treacherous bedrock isn’t still there. It doesn’t mean, when he’s held down and manhandled and delightfully ravished, that still, even now, even after everything, he doesn’t feel a cold whisper of fear.

And only wants more.

~

“Corvo,” he gasps, and Corvo presses him against the closed glass door and seals their mouths together, swallows his own name.

The Outsider gropes at him and moans as Corvo’s tongue pushes into him, strokes along his. Sides, hips, upper arms—he’s not seeking to gain any real hold so much as he wants to feel the strong solidity, the corded muscle beneath the clothes he can’t wait to get out of the way. Just after supper when the mood suddenly took both of them and they barely managed to get the inner chamber door closed before Corvo was on him, and really they might have not even bothered with the door, but when Corvo does bother it signals an intention, which is to cause the Outsider to make a certain amount of noise.

Which pulses a thrill down his spine. There are myriad techniques Corvo can use to accomplish this goal, and they’re all lovely, and probably he’ll be employing more than one.

Corvo parts the Outsider’s legs with his knee and moves it in and up, earning himself a whimper and a slow, helpless grind. Unless Corvo is feeling inclined to move quickly to both of their satisfaction, this kind of thing will go on for a while, until the Outsider is sighing and groping at him, uselessly chasing more friction, probably muttering curses on his name. Corvo will relent when he perceives that he has the Outsider teetering on the precipice of insanity, which is when he’ll likely demand to be asked _nicely_.

Damn him.

But the Outsider is ready for that. More than ready. He’s eager, practically throwing himself into the spirit even as his hips cant sharply forward and he fumbles at Corvo’s belt—

Corvo swats his hands brusquely away, hard enough to sting the Outsider’s knuckles, and the Outsider is letting out a wince and about to say something vaguely reproachful when Corvo seizes him by the hair and yanks his head back.

He freezes.

It’s not shock. But it is something in the vicinity. It’s not as if Corvo has never grabbed him by the hair before; Corvo has grabbed him pretty much by the _everywhere_ at this point. But it’s never been this hard, this close to cruel, and the sting is sending tears to his eyes. His throat is pulled so taut that it’s essentially impossible to swallow. Even breathing is taking some effort.

He stares wide-eyed at the ceiling. The last of the daylight easing through the panes is blurring into a pale mass. He listens to Corvo’s hoarse breathing, feels the body pinning his to the door.

The fear is there.

Only it’s more like a memory of fear, immediate but at a remove. It’s as if he isn’t entirely _here_ anymore.

At the very edge of his vision he seems to see something flash, something with an edge, and his wrists burn and a shiver takes him, sudden and uncontrolled.

Corvo doesn’t speak. But in some moments, Corvo’s lack of speech isn’t so much an absence as it is a placeholder, a silence in which something should be. Where his name would go, if he had one. The Outsider doesn’t like those moments; they’re uncomfortable and more than anything they remind him of a kind of continual failure, even if it’s not one he’s ever blamed for. One of them is happening now, and he can almost hear the tone in which the name would be said if Corvo had it to say: soft, querying. Concerned. Really, a way of saying something else.

_Do you want me to stop?_

_Tell me and I’ll stop._

He blinks and he feels the tears leaking from the corners of his eyes, hot and then rapidly cooling as they trickle down over the tops of his cheeks. _Stop_. And for an instant he thinks that’s what he wants, to stop. Because how this is making him feel is something new—or maybe not completely new, but further down a certain path than he’s ever gone, than they’ve ever gone together, and it’s impossible to ignore the plain and simple fact that that path frightens him.

He looks at it, at it snaking away into the misty, jagged stone forests of his deeper mind, and he believes that monsters lurk in those mists.

But Corvo is the Protector.

He drags in a ragged breath. What makes him do it, he isn’t sure then and won’t be sure later; he only knows that something else is gathering around him, emerging from the mists—loose and as hot as his fresh tears, flooding into him through the pain and buzzing in his head.

Rushing south to swell in his cock.

_Don’t you want to find out what this is?_

It’s nearly as impossible to nod as it is to swallow. But somehow he does.

Corvo’s laugh is low and a little wondering as he gives the Outsider’s hair another jerk and with his other hand roughly kneads the throbbing bulge between the Outsider’s legs, shoves him downward. “On your knees.”

But the Outsider is already dropping.

Not much more controlled than the shiver. He drops fast, hissing when his knees hit the carpet, the hiss sharpening into a gasp when Corvo drags him forward— _again_ by the hair, the Outsider dimly and bemusedly considers the possibility that Corvo will simply end up with a clump of it in his fist—and jams the Outsider’s face into his crotch.

“You want that?”

The Outsider stiffens, gropes mindlessly at Corvo’s thighs—for purchase, and then for a few seconds he thinks he might be about to attempt to resist. But then his hands find Corvo’s hips and settle there, framing him, and something in him uncoils as Corvo lets up just enough to allow him to breathe.

He breathes. Feels. The fingers wound tight in his hair, the fabric rubbing against his skin. The length of Corvo’s cock pressed against his cheek and the corner of his mouth, hard and getting harder, and the scent of it, of him, thick and overwhelmingly male, and the Outsider turns his head just enough to nuzzle it, mouthing at it with parted lips.

Corvo sighs, and with his other hand strokes the back of his head—briefly gentle. Encouraging. But there’s still a taut edge in it, and in his voice when he speaks.

“Asked you a question.” His hands tighten. “Do you want it?”

It’s difficult, but the Outsider manages to nod. Moans softly.

“That’s not an answer.” This time the yank at his hair is even harsher and he rocks awkwardly backward, nearly losing his hold on Corvo’s hips, fresh tears flooding into his eyes and tingling in his nose. He stares up, meets the dark eyes burning into his. “Use your words.” Corvo cups himself and kneads, his eyes slipping half closed. “You want my cock in your slutty mouth, you make me believe it.”

The Outsider stiffens again. Comes close to faltering. It’s not as if there hasn’t been playful name-calling here before; that was going on almost since the beginning. But as with so many other things, this time feels different—in a way he can’t define, it’s _heavier,_ a weight on his shoulders and his chest and pressure crowding in on his muscles.

Like binds.

And again it occurs to him that perhaps he should be alarmed.

Instead he summons up the strength to do as he’s told, even through the strain in his neck. The words come out reedy and choked.

“Please.” He tries to swallow, can’t. “Corvo, please... I want it. I want your cock. Please.”

Corvo chuckles, shakes his head. “Not good enough. Say it.” He forms the syllables slowly and with exaggerated patience, as though he’s reviewing a lesson with an unusually distracted child. “Say _I want your cock in my slutty mouth, please._ ”

The Outsider blinks at him, momentarily nonplussed, his lips moving soundlessly. Yet another thing on top of the rapidly growing pile of things that aren’t entirely unfamiliar and yet are totally new. He’s been teasingly instructed to beg before. He’s never been fed the line this way.

“I—” he starts, and falls silent, because it’s bizarrely difficult to continue.

Which is when Corvo slaps his face.

It’s more sharp than it is hard. But it stuns him and he drops back and to the side, catching himself on one hand and pressing the other to his cheek. The skin under his fingers seems to burn. He gapes up at the man looming over him—the man who suddenly looks uncertain, thrown off-balance, as if what he’s just done startled him as badly as the man he did it to.

Corvo bends and reaches out for him, touches the back of his hand. He appears reluctant to presume the right to do more than that. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “Shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“No.”

Apparently it’s the Outsider’s turn to surprise himself.

His tone is low, quiet, but although there’s a very slight tremble in it, for the most part it’s steady. Corvo has frozen, gazing at him, obeying as quickly and completely as if their positions have been reversed.

Perhaps in a way they have.

“It’s all right,” the Outsider says, still quiet, and lowers his hand, pushes himself more upright. “I’m fine.”

Because he is. Because yes, given the monsters lurking in his shadows he should be alarmed by this, and he isn’t. If anything, the precise opposite is happening, and the heat the earlier roughness kindled in him is flaring.

Why is this happening? He couldn’t hope to understand.

“Corvo,” he murmurs, and actually smiles as the words come, easy as can be. They’re even sort of _funny;_ he sees that now. There’s a ludicrous aspect to them that he can more than appreciate. “I want your cock in my slutty mouth. Please.”

Corvo doesn’t move. His expression has slid into something inscrutable. But the Outsider rises onto his knees and takes Corvo by the hips again, once more nuzzles his lower belly. His groin. The cock so hard and trapped behind the cloth of Corvo’s trousers.

The Outsider flicks his eyes up, and his voice is husky with the strange need he feels rushing through him.

“Keep going.” He licks his lips. “Do whatever you want to do.”

_I can take it. And I want to see where this goes._

_I think it might be fascinating._

For another moment or two, Corvo merely looks at him—still difficult to read, but the Outsider gets the distinct sense that he’s mulling something over. Working it through. Trying, maybe, to decide what he does want to do.

The Outsider waits. In the waiting there’s a peculiar calm, and it gathers around him and he breathes it in. It fills him, that stillness, and he drifts on it, and it takes him a few seconds to notice it when Corvo reaches down and gently takes him by the wrists and tugs him to his feet.

He goes unprotestingly and unhesitatingly, only wincing a little when his knees straighten—his body might technically not even be out of its teens but sometimes it feels much older than that, much closer to what would be appropriate, because stars, he’s the actual _old man_ of the two of them—and then forgetting everything when Corvo draws him in and kisses him. Not like it was at first: this is light, scarcely a flick of tongue against the seam of the Outsider’s lips, and the fingers in his hair caress him with something not far from reverence.

He sighs into the kiss, and Corvo pulls back enough to whisper against the corner of his mouth.

“I won’t hurt you. You know that.” He pauses. “Or... Not any way you don’t want.”

The Outsider releases another sigh. “I know.”

“You tell me to stop, any time, and I will.”

“I know.” He curls both hands around the nape of Corvo’s neck and leans into him, and something warm and soft in the raspy hum of Corvo’s voice knots up in the base of his throat.Not like straining. Not like force. “I love you.”

“You trust me?”

The Outsider breathes a laugh. “You caught me when I fell off the damn Clocktower, I think I trust you.”

The sweet curve of Corvo’s smile against his jaw, and he knows whatever happens next, it’ll be all right. Even if it’s heavy, or strained. Even if it gets difficult to breathe.

Corvo tips his head back and licks at his adam’s apple. “Turn around.”

He does.

As soon as he hears the clink of Corvo’s belt he knows what’s coming, and when Corvo takes his wrists once more and pulls them back, presses them together and he feels the leather tightening around them, every muscle snaps back into cold rigidity. His breath stutters in his chest and he arches a little—not so much trying to free himself as he is working involuntarily into the preamble of doing so. But _I won’t hurt you_ and he has no doubt in this world or any other that it’s true, and he searches for the calm as Corvo tugs him backward against him, takes his restrained hands and cups them over the erection still confined behind Corvo’s fly.

“You’re going to get back on your knees.” Hot breath and the scrape of teeth against the Outsider’s ear, and a hitching moan escapes him. “I’m going to use you. And if you’re good, I _might_ let you come afterward. Will you be good?”

 _I might let you come._ All at once he’s freshly aware of his own cock, which hasn’t lost interest in any of this, and he rolls his hips forward into nothing and trembles as he thinks of everything that could mean. Rough, calloused hands gone slick and stroking him, the wet heaven of Corvo’s mouth, any number of things, and he’d take whatever Corvo feels like giving him and sure as _shit_ he’d beg for it if that’s what’s required of him.

Be used if that’s what Corvo wants.

He nods.

“No, _say_ it.”

“I’ll be good, Corvo,” he whispers, and Corvo’s free hand closes around his throat.

And here comes the terror.

Only a flash of it, like lightning striking the ground. But as with lightning, a crack of thunder follows on its heels, and just for a moment it all comes screaming back, every frightened, desperate animal instinct he felt in the worst and final minutes of a first life.

 _Get loose. Whatever it takes, whatever you have to do, get away. Run. Fucking_ run _._

The hand on his throat, big and strong, firm—but not squeezing. The power is all potential, although the lethality of it is stark and immediate. Merely a little pressure and Corvo could kill—a thing Corvo is an expert at in a way few men are. It would be nothing. Once the Outsider was a god capable of unfathomable strength, and now he’s a human in an all-too-frail human body. Even without magic he wouldn’t stand a chance. _A second or two and a flex of the will and he could break you like a brittle twig._

No. He won’t.

“Sir,” Corvo murmurs. His thumb swipes down the side of the Outsider’s neck, over the carotid artery. “I think I’d like you to call me Sir.”

Oh.

Twin waves crash over him at once—from opposite directions, from the same one, and for an instant he’s speechless and adrift in it, lost between laughter and a moan. The _silliness_ of this has reasserted itself—not that it’s stupid, not that it’s a thing to mock, but that there is something so fundamentally absurd about all of it—but also there’s the word, the one syllable: _Sir._ He mouths it, knows Corvo can feel the slight movement of his jaw as he does. The gentle hiss through and behind the teeth, the curve of the tongue as the sound moves backward toward the throat. As if it’s entering him.

A word used by soldiers and guards, servants and underlings. Even in mere politeness. A very conventional title. Nothing in particular to find remarkable there.

And yet that’s clearly not how he’s meant to be using it now.

This is not just being manhandled and pushed up against a wall and pinned down. It isn’t even having a belt wound around his wrists. It’s the hand at his throat, so decisive and so terribly gentle. It’s _command me_ and _use me_ and _I’ll do anything._ It’s _you’re everything_.

It’s _I trust you._

Years of others having power over him and exercising it in the most sadistic ways. Years, and then four millennia, because he never had a choice, no one ever asked him; they only took. They took his humanity and his life and his name away and they bound him so much more completely than this belt ever could. And he’s still afraid now, because he can’t stop remembering, is cursed _always_ to remember, but Corvo is holding his throat and _commanding_ him, and in a third great and completely counterintuitive wave it hits him all at once that _he is the powerful one now._

Because he could make it stop. If he wanted.

“Sir,” he whispers, and smiles and almost laughs. The word, he loves it. “Yes. Sir.”

“Good boy,” Corvo murmurs, spins him around and shoves him back down.

He goes down even harder this time and it hurts, even with the carpet, and when he winces and almost unbalances he glances up and knows that Corvo is enjoying that sound of pain, was hoping for it, was aiming to produce it. _He likes hurting me._ It makes his breath stutter and snag and his wrists press the worn leather taut; this isn’t new either, that enjoyment, but it’s never been this stark. This purposeful. _He likes hurting me. Not the way he likes hurting other people, bad people—he does like that, even if he tries not to—but he does. Oh, he does._

_He’s just never really let it show with me. Not the way he could._

A couple of perfunctory flicks and Corvo’s fly is down and he’s drawing himself out, has the Outsider by the hair again and holding him in place. The lamps by the bed are lit, but the bed is halfway across the room still, the dregs of the light overhead are dying, and everything is dense shadow and indistinct. Corvo’s fingers curled around his shaft, the movement of a stroke, the gleam of welling precome at the head. The boy who was once a god waits unsteadily on his knees, his neck craned into an uncomfortable arch and his shoulders pulled back by the belt, and he doesn’t have to be told to open his mouth and accept what he’s given. 

He sighs when Corvo’s cock slides past his lips, sweeping his tongue across it, and Corvo’s groaning laugh is deep and sweet as honey.

But the hard edge isn’t gone from his voice.

“There you go. Show me how much you love it.” Corvo is still gripping himself by the base, pulling the Outsider in as he pushes slow and relentless. “Show me how much of a slut you are.”

In so many ways this is a reprise, an echo of many times and of a first time: that night, gripping the Outsider’s head and fucking his mouth, doing it so hard at first that he choked and gagged. But that wasn’t intentional.

This is.

The head of Corvo’s cock brushes the back of the Outsider’s throat—and doesn’t pull back. Doesn’t ease off this time, doesn’t stop. He grips and presses and holds, and the Outsider twitches in a jolt of instinctive panic as his soft palate is blocked and suddenly he can’t breathe at all.

Remembers that his arms are restrained and panics even more.

But that’s his body. He merely feels it, the instinctive urge to struggle for air, and it sweeps over and through him and leaves him there, his head in both of Corvo’s ruthless hands.

“Take it,” Corvo grunts; through a blur the Outsider glimpses his head thrown back, the tendons in his neck working as he drags in an enviable breath. “Take all of it. Take it down your fucking throat.” More shadows and a flash of teeth; a grin. “Be good for me.”

The urge to struggle isn’t gone, but with every second it’s becoming less immediate. Over it is that strange calm—and a kind of determination. He said he would be good. He said he would and he wants to be and he will, and although the depleted air is turning hot in his lungs and tears are streaming down his cheeks and it’s taking every ounce of focus to keep his gag reflex in check, he does as he’s commanded.

His cock still hasn’t wilted at all—and that’s a detail he’ll be mulling over much later—but this isn’t even about coming anymore. Nor is it about any potential retribution Corvo might mete out if he fails.

_I’ll be good._

He’s trembling and whimpering when Corvo finally pulls out and releases him, slumping forward against Corvo’s thigh and wracked with wet coughing. And Corvo’s fingers are working through his hair, gentle again, and what the Outsider feels is nothing more or less than an intensely weird form of triumph.

He was given a task to perform, and he’s apparently put in at least a satisfactory performance.

Like a revelation: It’s so blessedly simple.

“Good,” Corvo purrs. “Like I said. Good boy.”

The whine that breaks out of him when Corvo hauls him back up and thrusts into him is positively canine—appropriately so, some remote part of him observes wryly—and he doesn’t have time to summon that calm control. Corvo isn’t pushing in and pausing; he’s fucking the Outsider’s face in sharp, unrestrained snaps of his hips, yanking at his hair and digging blunt nails into his scalp and laughing when the Outsider gasps and shakes and hears himself letting out noises far more like smothered sobs.

_He likes hurting you. He likes it._

It does hurt; the pain is a cascade of angry fireworks behind his stinging eyes, no longer a playful little bit of spice to season a greater pleasure but a thing in and of itself, taking center stage and hogging all the limelight. Not only in his scalp or his lungs or his knees or his shoulders but _everywhere_ —and more than pain. Above and beyond pain. It’s like the waves again, only Corvo is the wave now, a dark and terrible wave rising over him and smashing down, dragging him into itself and sweeping him out to sea. All that lethal force, bent entirely toward using him for its own pleasure.

He’s felt this before too, or at least he’s skimmed its surface. But now he’s plunging into its depths. How it feels to lie in the thrall of this kind of power and surrender to it.

How exquisite it can be to give up.

A grunt and Corvo withdraws abruptly enough to startle him, forcing the Outsider’s face up and once more gripping himself. Another fit of coughing is rising in him and his tears are joining the streams of spit running down his chin but all he has the attention for is Corvo’s eyes black and shining and the sheer _sadism_ he sees in them, cool and amused.

But that’s not all he sees.

“Shit, just look at you.” Corvo almost sounds wondering. “Down there taking it like a fucking whore. But you aren’t a whore, are you?” He nudges the Outsider’s swollen lips with the head of his cock, lightly knocks it against them. “No, you’re not. I don’t have to pay for you. You’re all mine.”

 _Mine_. And everything in the Outsider screams _Yes_.

“Tell me.” Another nudge, more insistent. “I want to hear you say it.”

“I’m—” But he must not be quick enough for Corvo’s liking, because the hand tangled in his hair lets him go only to whip back and slap him again, hard enough to break light open in his head, hard enough that he wobbles treacherously sideways and cries out.

No concern this time, and certainly no apologies. Corvo pulls him brusquely upright, and the danger of his impatience is clear in his tone. “Say. It.”

Another thing, very clear: Corvo is ready to do a lot more to him in terms of punishment than merely deny him an orgasm.

Even eager.

 _You’re obviously getting along just fine, but when this is all over,_ notes that remote portion of his brain, _you and he may want to have some kind of discussion about exactly how far you’re prepared to let him go. You know? Just throwing it out there._

“I’m yours,” he croaks. He barely recognizes his own voice. Stars, what is he going to sound like _tomorrow?_ Then, catching himself just as he feels Corvo’s hand tense warningly: “Sir.”

“Good.” Again, the head of Corvo’s cock against his lips, tracing them as if painting them. “You want me in your mouth again?”

Shaky nod. It’s all he can manage, and he hopes desperately that it’s enough. Although later, before the discussion they _absolutely_ ought to have, he’ll think back and reflect that really, he could have managed more than a nod. He could have, and he knew he was tempting Corvo to more punishment by not doing so, and that temptation was not unintentional.

But Corvo doesn’t slap him. He only shakes his head, and his expression is faintly regretful. “Afraid not. You didn’t earn it. Oh, you’re good,” he adds, starting to move his fist up and down his shaft in swift, easy strokes. “No mistake about that. But I think you can be better.”

 _Please_. The words are surging under the Outsider’s breastbone, and yet for reasons he can’t express he knows he shouldn’t say them now. He should watch Corvo jerking himself off inches away from the mouth he could be using, and he should put every bit of the frantic dismay he’s feeling on full albeit silent display. _Please, no, let me, let me do it, I want it, I did what you said, I’ll be good._ Staring at Corvo’s cock like it’s the only thing in the world he wants and the only thing he has _ever_ wanted, like it’s far beyond desire into need as intense as the need for air and water. Like it’s all that sustains him. Like he would fall down and worship it as a fucking _god_ if Corvo ordered him do so.

There’s conscious intent in it. It’s an act he’s putting on, for Corvo’s pleasure, for his own.

It’s also kind of not.

“I love coming down your slutty throat,” Corvo growls, speeding up and tripping into the uneven rhythm that always signals him closing in on the peak and ready to soar. “But coming all over your slutty fucking face’ll do for now.”

And this, this has never happened before, but the Outsider finds himself of the opinion that it isn’t really all that big a step down when Corvo goes rigid and snarls and shoots hot streaks across the Outsider’s nose and cheeks and chin.

 _Thoughtful of him to avoid the eyes,_ the remote part of him notes, and the rest of him couldn’t possibly care any less, because the rest of him is focused on stretching his tongue to lick up every drop he can reach, and this should be a humiliation but he’s as shameless as you please.

He does please. Very much so.

He’s distantly conscious that it might end now, that in previous and far milder versions of this game everything tended to draw to a natural conclusion after the point of climax. But he hasn’t come—although only now is he even fully aware of himself again, as if only now does he even _matter_ —and in any case it’s clear that nothing whatsoever is ending when Corvo casually lets him crumple to the floor to lie half curled on his side, arms awkwardly bent back under him, heaving ragged breaths. 

Corvo wanted to use him. Well, he’s been used.

He peers blearily up at Corvo tucking himself back in and doing up his fly, and giving the Outsider a glance that an observer might interpret as only half interested. Even dismissive.

_Oh, dear Corvo. Even now you can’t fool me._

“Do you still want to come?” Corvo’s eyes drop to the Outsider’s groin, where he’s now barely half erect—more out of lack of focus than lack of arousal. The heat is still there, smoldering. The question strokes across his ears like teasing fingertips and he shivers. “Is that even a live issue anymore?”

The Outsider swallows. His throat feels bruised. It isn’t, he’ll later confirm, but for now it seems that way, and he doesn’t altogether hate the feeling. He also doesn’t answer—uncertain of what he should say, yes, but also hanging back and waiting.

Waiting to see what happens.

What happens is that Corvo turns away and strides across the room to the sideboard, unstoppers the decanter of brandy sitting on a salver and pours himself a glass. Moves back to an armchair by the fireplace and scoots it close, sinks down into it and crosses his legs, toys idly with the glass. Tilts his head and regards the limp, gasping, come-spattered boy at his feet as if he might be mildly interesting after all.

“What _should_ I do with you?” he muses, takes a swallow of the brandy and releases an appreciative breath. “Clean you up? Wait a while and fuck you?” He flashes a grin, and although there’s no fire made up it’s as if firelight glints wickedly off his teeth. “Leave you there?”

The Outsider whimpers and twitches, tries to roll himself into a less strained position. The lack of an answer remains purposeful—and Corvo’s questions are clearly rhetorical in any case—but here’s another strange thing.

He’s not positive he could speak very easily if he tried. And it has nothing to do with the abuse Corvo just put his mouth through. It’s part of the dense, heavy peace descending over him like a blanket. Not tired, not drained.

Peaceful.

This dynamic is indeed very simple: Be told to do a thing, and either do it or don’t. Then take the consequences, for good or ill. This man must at all costs be pleased with him.

And yet he’s utterly without doubt that Corvo will be supremely pleased with him no matter what he does.

Corvo takes another sip of brandy and appears to consider for a bit longer. Then he must arrive at some decision, because he sets the glass down and rises, steps over the Outsider’s body and goes to the panel on the wall where the lighting controls rest. A flick of his thumb and they’re cranked up as high as they can go, and although the gracefully designed lighting in the Royal Protector’s bedchamber isn’t by any means _harsh_ even at its brightest, the transition is sharp enough to be like a slap of its own on the Outsider’s retinas. He snaps his eyes shut and winces, and doesn’t miss Corvo’s low, approaching rumble of a laugh.

The soft footsteps stop behind him, and in spite of the discomfort the heat of the body bending close to his makes him hum and curl toward it like a plant toward sun.

“I want to be able to see you.” The belt loosens and slips free and the Outsider shifts again and flops his arms forward with a groan of mingled pain and relief. “And you’ll need the use of your hands.”

The Outsider lifts his head as Corvo settles back in the armchair, then tries experimentally to lift the rest of himself. He grits his teeth as his stiff muscles lodge vehement complaints, but it’s not too difficult to get himself half upright. He glances down; it’s more than the come streaked over his face, more than the state his poor hair must be in. At some point at least two buttons popped off his shirt and he’s decidedly damp all down the front, wet linen and gleaming skin. He’s a spectacular mess, in the most literal sense of _spectacle_.

He is precisely the way Corvo wants him to be.

“You could have done anything to me once,” Corvo says softly over the rim of the glass, and the Outsider stiffens, gazing at him with widening eyes.

This is always there between them, this shared and extremely uncomfortable history. It couldn’t not be. It’s not merely present; it’s a raw patch, a painful memory of what turned out in the end to be a bad time for both of them—a time which, by and large, neither of them would prefer to remember.

Except it’s why they’re together at all. So in truth it’s a memory the Outsider can’t help but treasure. Even as it hurts.

But it’s raw. Raw, and at least on the Outsider’s part there’s still a healthy amount of self-loathing—deserved or not, and no matter how often Corvo tells him it isn’t, it remains. Corvo is careful about it, watches what he says and what he does, treads lightly and is quick to guide the Outsider away from it and onto safer ground when necessary.

Now he’s flicked open his sword and he’s stabbing right at it.

“You could have done anything,” Corvo repeats. His voice is low, both sandpapery and smooth as the brandy must be. “It was your world, not mine. You could shape it with a thought. You probably could have annihilated me just as easily.” He nods at the Outsider. “Now look at you.” Swallow of brandy, and the corner of his mouth curls. “Strip.”

The Outsider stares at him. Dimly he’s aware of his hands drifting numbly to the remaining buttons of his shirt. He can spare the attention to do as Corvo is saying, moving like he’s obeying in a dream, but every other part of him, remote and otherwise, is lost in shock.

And perhaps—just perhaps—more than two thirds of the shock is because of how raw this patch suddenly _doesn’t_ feel.

Yes, he could have done anything once. Now he’s a frail human being in a frail human body, a body this man could destroy without more than minimal effort, shrugging off his shirt and pushing up on his aching knees to undo his trousers. Doing only as he’s told. Because he doesn’t _have_ to do anything else, because this man would unhesitatingly bring all of this to a screeching halt if he was told to do that, because this man likes hurting him but would never, ever hurt him.

Because this man loves him. And the one thing this man does above all others—all others except love—is protect.

This man watching him with those glittering eyes as he slides his smallclothes down his hips and legs and casts them aside, rocks back naked on his heels and drops his gaze to the floor. Before he does, he sees it behind the dark glitter and the sadistic amusement. Warm, unmistakable.

_It’s all right. You see? We can go there like this, because it’s all right._

But then the Outsider’s eyes are aimed submissively downward, because he should not look _Sir_ in the eyes unless he’s bid to do so.

Eyes have power. Sometimes they have all of it.

For a long moment Corvo does nothing. Then he slowly leans forward and reaches out, and the Outsider doesn’t flinch as fingers comb once more into his hair—gentle now, petting him. Approving.

“Good boy.”

The Outsider sighs, and it’s a sigh of bone-deep contentment.

Rough fingertips gliding from his hairline down his cheek, through semen now drying and flaking away, to his lips. Pausing there, lingering.

Gone.

Corvo sits back again and gestures at him like a monarch on a throne directing his jester to do something entertaining. “Touch yourself. Jerk off. You can come when I say,” he adds with a cautionary lifted finger after a sip of brandy. “Not before. Don’t you dare.”

Still moving as if lost in a dream from which he can’t and doesn’t especially want to escape, the Outsider lowers his hand between his legs and begins to do as he’s told.

Now he understands the lights. It’s more than just Corvo being able to see him properly. He’s been naked in this room countless times by now, and it’s not as though Corvo has made a secret of how much he delights in looking at the Outsider in any state of dress and in light of any kind, but now he feels _naked_ in a way he doesn’t recall ever feeling here, spread open and exposed on a level he didn’t know existed. Corvo has seen this too, plenty of times, the Outsider’s hand moving over himself—toying, stroking—but he’s never demanded a show.

This isn’t shame. It isn’t even really embarrassment. It’s just pure knife-sharp self-consciousness, of every movement of every muscle, and the knowledge that there is totally nowhere for him to hide.

If Corvo wants a show, the Outsider is cognizant that he isn’t really putting on one that anyone at the Golden Cat would find noteworthy. He’s not taking his time, not overtly performing any enjoyment or pleasure exaggerated for the benefit of an audience—although it does feel good, his tightening fist around his shaft and the gradually increasing friction, his thumb pushing up over his foreskin and lightly rubbing, and his eyes slip half closed as he releases a quiet moan. But he senses it’s enough, more than enough to make Corvo happy. That it’s more than enough that he’s doing anything. Whatever Corvo might be saying now, there are no expectations here.

Later, maybe that’ll change.

It’s enough that he’s doing it. It’s enough that he’s leaning back on one hand and spreading his legs wider, arching as he rolls his hips to meet the rhythm of his fist. Now that he’s really gotten going he can tell it wouldn’t take long, all that pent-up frustrated energy from earlier hasn’t gone anywhere, but Corvo ordered him to wait for permission, so he eases off a little, slows and bites at his lip as he wrestles his shallow breaths under control. Through all of this his eyes have been demurely down or closed or up at the brilliant lenses of the chandeliers, but just for a fleeting and partially accidental second he catches a glimpse of Corvo’s face—dark eyes narrow and cool, the mostly empty brandy glass hovering near his mouth, his lips curved into the shade of a smile.

A hundred different things in that smile, all of them wonderful.

The smile alone is enough to tip him hazardously back toward the edge and he bites down harder, nearly stops—and doesn’t, because he hasn’t been told to do that, and he also doesn’t beg, because he hasn’t been told to do that either. He simply works himself along the balance beam Corvo has set him on, tipping this way and that... teetering a little, the muscles in his arms and thighs starting to quiver as his features twist into a grimace of effort and discomfort and pleasure. The few drops of precome initially slicking the edge of his forefinger have swelled way past a _few_ and he’s close to dripping, slicking his other fingers and only making it more difficult to keep control. His head drops back and he hisses air through bared teeth, and what would it do to him if Corvo wanted him to stay like this for a long time, for _hours,_ balancing on a beam thinning to a rope thinning to a thread with deliciously cruel punishments awaiting him when he finally topples over.

_He likes hurting you._

_And you like it when he does_.

 _Corvo_. He mouths the name silently—catches the slip, whimpers and breathes _Sir, Sir,_ like he can paper it over, and he’s suddenly filled with the terror that Corvo really _will_ want him do this for hours now, because what crueler and more appropriate punishment could there be for such a transgression?

But Corvo— _Sir_ —is capable of infinite mercy to match his cruelty. Because he gives the Outsider an indulgent and faintly pitying smile— _poor thing, I know you can’t help it, one can’t expect too much so soon_ —and drains the rest of the brandy.

“Go ahead.”

That’s all it takes. Everything releases at once and floods through him, out of him; he wrenches his hips up and bites back something not far from a scream, shuddering and spilling over his fist for what does indeed feel like hours. Until he can’t hold himself up anymore and he collapses onto his back, nerves rippling with aftershocks and gasping like Corvo just went at his mouth again, his come-slippery hand resting on his belly and his other loose at his side, his legs fallen wide open.

For a little while, nothing.

Then the squeak of the chair as Corvo gets to his feet, the sound of his passing footsteps, and the light beating against the Outsider’s lids subsides to a placid glow.

He hears Corvo return to him, pause and bend, and when he feels hands on his upper arms he assumes Corvo is about to lift and carry him—a laughably easy job that would be, dead weight or no. But Corvo is only lifting him enough to settle cross-legged under him, lowering the Outsider’s head and shoulders into his lap. Rough, calloused hands caressing him. His hair, his face, his neck and arm. His back all the way down to the base of his spine and back up again. Soothing him, not that he needs to be soothed.

Presently: “You all right?”

The Outsider nods. That’s the correct answer, if anyone or anything is keeping score; he is, very.

“That was...” Corvo breathes a soft, bewildered laugh. “I don’t even know _what_ the fuck that was. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“If I wanted you to stop,” the Outsider says, speaking slowly and with precise enunciation, like a drunk man attempting to not sound drunk, “I would have said.”

“I know, but I—” And another laugh. The Outsider snuggles a little further into the welcoming bowl of Corvo’s lap and echoes it, because in the beginning he thought this was all at least a _tiny_ bit silly and that hasn’t changed.

It’s just apparently a hell of a lot more than that.

“I said things.”

“You certainly did.” The Outsider turns his head enough to press his lips to the inside of Corvo’s thigh. It has ended now, and the things he selfishly wants are reasserting themselves: the softness of the mattress under him, the covers over them, and for there to not be quite so much fabric between skin and skin when he kisses Corvo there. “There were things, and you said them.”

The lightest of light swats on his shoulder. “Cut it out, you know what I mean.” A pause, which the Outsider permits to stretch. “I guess maybe now isn’t the best time to talk about this.”

“Mm.”

“But we should, shouldn’t we? Talk.”

The Outsider lets out a breath. Whether a veil has dropped or reset itself in place, he doesn’t know; probably both in varying measures, and likely it doesn’t matter. However much of what just happened was playacting is something else he isn’t sure of, but one thing he has established to his own confidence.

It was real. It was probably one of the most purely real things he’s ever experienced.

“We should.” Still moving a bit stiffly, he turns onto his back and stares up at Corvo’s intent face, meets his searching eyes, raises a hand and traces Corvo’s craggy, silver-flecked jawline.“Especially since I think I want to do it again.”

“You—” Corvo doesn’t sound exactly astonished, but he also doesn’t sound as if this was something he was expecting to hear. “You do?”

Nod. Solemn. This is all silly, and also an occasion for solemnity. Those things, as he has discovered, are not mutually exclusive. “If you do.” He touches the seam of Corvo’s lips. “Only if you do.”

Corvo blinks at him, and for a vaguely absurd few seconds the Outsider wonders if he’s fighting back tears. Then he reaches up and curls his hand around the Outsider’s, kisses his knuckles. Presses them against his cheek. “I think I do.”

“I’m safe with you,” the Outsider murmurs. “I never doubt that. You hear me? I never do.”

Corvo gazes down at him, suddenly difficult to read although he’s holding the Outsider’s hand as tightly as ever. “That doesn’t mean I can’t fuck up.”

“No, it doesn’t.” The Outsider gently tugs his hand free and extends his index finger, presses it against the tip of Corvo’s nose. _Boop_. “That’s why it’s so good that we’re going to talk about it.”

For a moment or two the Outsider half expects him to keep arguing. But Corvo only laughs again, shakes his head as his hands resume their unhurried passage over the Outsider’s body. “All right. Good.”

_Good boy._

For a while, nothing much but quiet and possibly a light doze. After that the Outsider stirs and groans and pushes himself up on one hand, rubs a thumb across his cheeks and makes a face. “Look what you _did_ to me.”

“You were asking for it,” Corvo points out amiably. “Literally, you were.”

“I wasn’t asking you to try out some kind of fancy new protein-rich skin emollient on me.” But all the annoyance is play, and it hits him that they’ve always been doing that in one way or another. Playing.

It’s merely far more mutual these days.

The Outsider sits fully up, shakes himself and glances around at the debris field of his clothes. “Give me and you a bath and put us to bed.”

“Oh, you’re giving the orders now?”

“Isn’t that only fair?” He twists at the waist and again catches Corvo with a hand at his jaw, leans in as if for a kiss—but stops, gaze roaming over that weathered, beautiful, beloved face, mapping it even though he knows every millimeter of it better than his own. All the power and the darkness, the cruelty and the tenderness, the sadism and desire to heal, the grief and joy and rage, the violence and mercy and twin warring yearnings for vengeance and justice, and the love, oh, so much terrible love that it never stops astounding him.

He doesn’t understand this. But the thing about love is that by nature it’s incomprehensible.

“You fascinate me,” the Outsider whispers, and grins as he grazes their lips together. “Sir.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not long after what the Outsider is thinking of as The Incident, he and Corvo finally talk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I’m like “I want to write some slightly dark and fairly emotion-heavy kink” and this fic is like “okay but it’s these two so it’s also gonna be cute and bantery, hope that’s cool :)” And that does indeed appear to be what’s happening. 
> 
> Well, cute and bantery along with sex is indicated in these trying times. 
> 
> ❤️

“We should have a word.”

The Outsider looks up, the idle swinging of his legs over the edge of the platform abruptly ceasing. He’s not startled, not really, but since Corvo brought him here tonight neither of them has said very much, and unlike their usual companionable silences, this one feels as though something is lurking in it.

Not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s still lurking, and that’s unsettling in and of itself.

But the Outsider also knows instantly what this is; it’s the whole reason Corvo brought him here to begin with, back up to this place which is, among all the places in Dunwall they’ve visited together, possibly the most special.

The place where he fell.

_I love you, you know._

It’s days since what the Outsider has taken to internally calling The Incident, and they were going to talk but so far they haven’t done so, and the Outsider rather suspects it’s because they’re both still a little stunned about it and unsure of where to even make a start. So now it’s the moonlight and the pale glow of the Clocktower’s massive face half illuminating the sharper edges of Corvo’s profile and throwing his eyes into shadow. It’s the warm softness of the night all around them, the city spread out like a handful of jewels scattered on a black sheet and somewhere far below them someone playing something sweet and sad on a violin.

Corvo has decided that since he doesn’t know where to make a start, they might as well start here as anywhere.

The Outsider cocks his head. “What sort of word?”

“To use when you want it to stop.”

“Why? Why not just say _stop it?_ ”

“Because,” Corvo says—in that patient tone he adopts when the Outsider is forgetting something he once would have instantly known, which should be irritating and even slightly embarrassing but somehow never really is. “It can be fun to beg for it to stop and have it keep going anyway.”

Oh. Of course. The confusion evaporates and the corner of the Outsider’s mouth quirks.

“ _Retribution_.”

Corvo breathes a laugh and ducks his head. “Yeah, please not that one. Pretty much any word but that one.”

“What, are you seriously telling me you didn’t enjoy that?” The Outsider buffets his shoulder lightly against Corvo’s, slides a bit closer. Not that he wasn’t already close. “Not even a tiny bit? You did keep shocking him for a _while_ after you got what you needed.”

The Outsider still can’t make out Corvo’s eyes through the shadow, but he can feel them rolling anyway. “Oh, fine, I did enjoy it. He was your standard brand of rich and awful, I indulged myself. Especially since it didn’t actually do him any lasting damage.” Pause, and the pressure of that gaze settles fully on the Outsider. A fine little shiver rolls down his spine. “But it’s not the same way with you.”

“I know.” The Outsider pulls in a slow breath, looks back out at the city. The thick winding snake of the Wrenhaven running through it to the ocean, shimmering with smears of light. “You like hurting me.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“I know that too.” The Outsider feels at his side, finds Corvo’s hand and covers it with his, thumb sweeping slowly across the big knobs of his knuckles. “I like it when you do,” he says presently. “You probably noticed I basically always have. But that night, it was... It was _pain_. It wasn’t just pain.” His teeth catch his lower lip, worry at it; in suddenly vivid sense memory he recalls how swollen they were. Even by the next morning they were still puffy. He stood in the bathroom and studied himself in the looking glass for a long time. He searched for other marks, found faint friction burns on his wrists, and studied those too. _Marks_ are not new to either of them. But these are. “And I liked it.” He exhales heavily. “I don’t really understand. I know there are lots of people who love that sort of thing, of _course_ I know that, I just...”

“You just?” Corvo prods gently after a second or two.

“I suppose I just didn’t see myself as one of them,” the Outsider says softly. “Not... formally. I didn’t think about it like that.”

“Then what did you think? Once it started, what were you thinking?”

“I was thinking about how easily you could kill me,” the Outsider says at once, and at once knows it might have been the precise wrong thing to say. But it’s still true, and he intuits that now perhaps more than at any other time it’s important to tell the truth. “I know what it looks like, I know how you are when you kill someone.” He swallows and realizes all at once that his other hand is at his own throat, feeling for the thin, faint scar that will always be there. “I saw every single time you did.”

“I wouldn’t.” Corvo’s voice is very low, very steady, and it’s the kind of steadiness that comes when he’s doing absolutely everything in his considerable power to keep it from shaking. With horror, with fury, with sheer revulsion at the thought of it. “I would never, I would _never_ hurt you.”

“I know,” the Outsider repeats, and lifts his hand from his throat and settles it against Corvo’s cheek, turning his face further into the light. Taking a moment to simply look at him.

There are times when he thinks the shocking intensity of love itself might be enough to still his heart. Even if only for a second.

“It’s like asking for it to stop and having it go on,” he murmurs. “It’s about knowing that you won’t do that. That’s what I felt. It would be so easy for you, and you never would. I gave you control, told you to do whatever you wanted, and it was _my_ choice—and that’s the thing. I never had a choice before, and I do with you. I told you, I know I’m safe with you. I feel safe with you. There was _no time_ that night when I didn’t feel safe with you.” He halts and fixes Corvo’s eyes with his—locks them. _You must understand this. It’s categorically necessary that you understand this_. “If I didn’t, I would have stopped it.”

For a long time Corvo only stares at him, and the Outsider can sense the wheels of his mind turning rapidly over and within each other, nimble and quick but not hasty. Methodical. Working through it.

“I need to be sure of that,” he says slowly, firm emphasis on each word. “I need to be absolutely sure that you would. Or I can’t do it again.”

The Outsider gives him a small smile. “You need to feel safe too.”

“Something like that.”

“I would stop you.” The Outsider tugs and leans in, and the kiss is very light but it lingers. “I promise.”

“Good,” Corvo breathes, and suddenly the kiss isn’t light at all. Fingers are raking into the Outsider’s hair and holding him in place as Corvo pushes in hard and forces his lips further apart, all hungry aggression and thrusting tongue, teeth scraping the Outsider’s chin as he arches and moans.

_Good boy._

But they can’t exactly do much on a ledge this narrow, and Corvo eases off gradually, cooling down bit by bit and ending as gentle as he ever is. In the end they’re leaning against each other, half embracing, and the Outsider hums happily as Corvo nuzzles at him.

“So what kinds of things do you want to do?”

“I don’t really know.” The Outsider pulls back enough to shift to the side, tipping his head against Corvo’s shoulder. It’s such a beautiful night, and he can’t imagine a single place in the world he’d like to be more than right here. Talking about this deeply weird thing which maybe isn’t quite so weird after all. “Shouldn’t we decide on a word first?” He glances up. “Did you and Jessamine have one?”

“You know we had one.”

“I do,” the Outsider muses almost dreamily. “But just now I can’t seem to remember what it was.”

“Good.” Corvo’s lips pressed to the crown of his head, warm breath, the essential solidity of the body against his. “Honestly I’d prefer that to be only between me and her.”

The Outsider nods. He gets that, and it’s proper that it should be so.

“I’ll think about it. I’ll think about what I want to do. I don’t know what I want to do.” Besides more of the same. That much, he’s certain of. But the idea of further experimentation definitely appeals. He lifts and stretches his legs and lets them swing loose again. “What do _you_ want to do?”

“What I want,” Corvo says with more than an edge of wryness, “is for us to not get stuck in one of those loops where neither of us decides to do anything.”

“But there are a lot of possibilities, aren’t there?”

“Indeed there are,” Corvo agrees, and curls a strong arm around him. “We could get some books.”

The Outsider barks a surprised laugh. “ _Books?_ ”

“Sure, why not?” Corvo sounds mildly taken aback. “For ideas. There’s a ton of books on that particular subject. With illustrations. Some of them are realistic.” He lifts a shoulder in a half shrug. “Some are... less so.”

“I think,” says the Outsider, “that now I have a whole _assortment_ of new questions about your reading habits.”

Corvo tilts his head back and laughs at the sky, laughs the kind of unendingly wonderful laugh that floods down his chest and vibrates all through his core, and the Outsider smiles and nestles closer against Corvo’s broad side—feeling very safe. Safe up here, safe down there, safe anywhere Corvo cares to take him. He still doesn’t really understand this, but he also doesn’t understand the majority of things, not anymore, and so far he appears to be muddling along well enough.

They’ll do what they’ve been doing this entire time. They’ll figure it out together, they’ll take care of each other, and one way or another it’ll be all right.

The important thing has always been that they try.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want a look at what Corvo and Jess were getting up to in this universe, [here ya go.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19336438) :D


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Outsider and Corvo continue to work on working things out. With the aid of pornography.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gdi fic stop being CUTE
> 
> There will be much more smut in the next chapter. Much, much more. 
> 
> I’m never sure if this is gauche or not, but on the off-chance that it isn’t and you care: I also write pro stuff, and today saw the release of the second season of Tor Nightfire’s free audio anthology _Come Join Us by the Fire,_ in which I have a story. The anthology features work by Seanan McGuire, Catherynne M. Valente, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Indrapramit Das, Laird Barron, Cassandra Khaw, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Daniel M. Lavery, Maria Dahvana Headley, Damien Angelica Walters, and a ton more amazing people. Full lineup with link is **[here.](https://tornightfire.com/come-join-us-by-the-fire-season-two/)** My story—which is basically _Bird Box_ plus COVID-19 with messed up romance—is **[here.](https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details/Sunny_Moraine_If_Living_is_Seeing_I_m_Holding_my_B?id=AQAAAECcYk4iwM)**
> 
> Hope that and this provide a little distraction and sanity. Hang in there, y’all. ❤️❤️❤️

And so begins a surprisingly enlightening period of study and negotiation.

There are indeed, as Corvo told him, a _ton_ of books about this. Not in Dunwall Tower’s extensive main library, or on any of the shelves in parlors or offices or lounges; the Outsider’s feels virtually certain that he would have run into them before now. He’s been in the Tower for months at this point, and he likes to read, and he reads very quickly. Corvo produces these particular books a few at a time from his own sources, and the first one is from a secluded corner of his own shelves as the Outsider sprawls on his bed and reads something that has nothing whatsoever to do with what they’re working out between them.

He’s also find it more than a little boring—an ancient, epic poem from Wei-Ghon that features a hero wandering the featureless tundra for a long, _long_ time, hunting a magical white bear and in the meantime doing a lot of tedious soul-searching—so he lays it down when Corvo tosses the slim volume at him. He picks it up and examines it with interest. It’s bound in plain black leather, somewhat worn, with the title etched across the front cover in elegant silver lettering. Frowning slightly, he rolls into his stomach and reads it aloud.

“‘The Erotic Education of Angelica, OR How a Virginal Lady of Cullero Was Led Along the Delicious Paths of Discipline into the Exquisite Delights of Savage Sadism’.” His eyes flick up to Corvo, who’s settling comfortably on the foot of the bed and pulling off his boots. “‘A Novel’.”

Corvo shoots him a glance, goes to work on the other boot—wincing a little. He had to accompany Emily to a ribbon-cutting for a new factory complex and it took most of the day, and Corvo Attano is not immune to sore feet. “What?”

“That’s quite the evocative title.” The Outsider flips it open and pages through it. “Sort of spoils the ending, though, doesn’t it?”

“People aren’t usually reading these books for the plot.”

“I suppose that’s reasonable.” He stops about a quarter of the way through, scans a couple paragraphs. “Doesn’t take long to really get started, does it?” 

“Look, if you prefer a slow burn I can probably find you one.” Corvo scoots back, turns onto his side and rests his head on his hand. He’s shed his jacket and his shirt is partially unbuttoned, and the Outsider allows his attention to linger on the hollow between his collarbones, where it would be so pleasant to dip his tongue. And slide up, or down. “Most of them do get right down to business, though.”

“You keep talking like this is a genre you have some serious in-depth familiarity with.”

Corvo huffs a laugh, reaches out and flicks the Outsider’s ear. “Why are you having so much trouble with the notion that I might enjoy pornography?”

“I’m not _having trouble_ with it.” The Outsider swats at him like a vexing fly and skips to another scene, where the Virginal Lady in question is in the middle of an extremely hands-on lesson involving shackles, multiple canes, three nobles and an Overseer, what seems like several different kinds of oil, and the imaginative use of a plate of candied figs. “It just... I don’t know, I just never really considered it at all. I know it’s not unusual.” He scans down the page, flips to the next one. “I have to say, I wouldn’t have guessed you’d be into _this_ kind of pornography.”

Corvo arches a brow. “What exactly is that supposed to mean, _this kind?_ ”

“I mean it’s not very well-written, for one. The prose is awful.”

“People don’t usually read it for the prose any more than the plots,” Corvo says with extravagant patience, stretches out a little more and runs his fingertips lightly from the Outsider’s shoulder all the way down his spine. “Don’t tell me you’re judging me for it.”

“Possibly a little.” The Outsider flips to the end; the final scene appears to involve Angelica no longer remotely virginal and wielding a cat o’ nine tails over a class of naked, nubile, charmingly innocent young things. “It’s so...” He shakes his head and gives Corvo a bemused smile. “It’s ridiculous. Makes me want to laugh more than anything. It really gets you going?”

“I wish I had known,” Corvo says thoughtfully, shifting onto his back and slinging an arm behind his head, “that this process was going to involve explaining smut to you. I would have been better prepared.”

“Oh, come on.” The Outsider tosses the book aside and rolls his eyes, then rolls the rest of himself right over Corvo and settles full-length on top of him, folding his arms over Corvo’s chest and resting his chin on them. This is far more interesting than the book, anyway. “You don’t have to explain _smut_ to me, I know how it works.”

“You appear to think something being ridiculous can’t also _get someone going_.” Corvo reaches up and traces an idle fingertip across the Outsider’s hairline, lifting unruly black strands out of the way. “Sometimes it does that _because_ it’s ridiculous.”

“Sex is ridiculous,” the Outsider muses. Taken from that angle, it does actually make a fair degree of sense. Sex, as he’s discovered all over again, is a thing that can be approached countless ways from countless angles, a vast and surreal and constantly evolving country with innumerable border crossings. There are times when things go together perfectly that one might not immediately expect. Fear and desire. Pleasure and pain.

Ravenous arousal and uncontrolled laughter.

“So many things get so much easier when you don’t take them seriously,” Corvo says quietly. His big warm fingers wander down the Outsider’s jawline, the middle one settling just beneath the swell of his bottom lip. “This is supposed to be fun. You should be able to laugh at it.”

The Outsider studies him for a moment beneath the fringe of his hair, thinking back. The shape of words in his mouth and the moment at which it became easy to say them. “Can I tell you something?”

“I wish you would.”

“I almost _did_ laugh,” the Outsider says, tone lowering into something conspiratorial. “When you told me what to say. _I want your cock in my slutty mouth, please._ ” He can’t voice the words now without breaking into a grin. “It was just so ludicrous somehow, saying it that way, and when that occurred to me it was like... It all did feel easier after that.”

“There, you see?” Corvo smiles and lightly taps the Outsider’s curved lips, and the Outsider parts them, briefly catches Corvo’s fingertip with his teeth. “You do get it already.” A considering pause. “So you liked that part?”

The Outsider unfolds his arms, reaches out and threads his fingers through Corvo’s, examines them as if they can reveal something to him. “I told you before, I think I liked basically all of it.”

“How rough I was?” Corvo’s brows inch slightly upward. “The slapping?”

“Mm. I wouldn’t have expected the slapping part to be anything especially enjoyable, but...” The sharp flash of light too quick even for pain, the sense of numbing impact, and thenthe rush of heat. The way it seemed to rush downward, flowing over his ribs and spine to pool between his legs. “It was. It really was.”

“The belt?” Corvo says it very softly, and when the Outsider meets his eyes they’re deep and solemn. Perhaps even a little uneasy. Neither of them have gone so far as to articulate what that moment meant, when the Outsider’s wrists were restrained that way—what it touched, why it was different from the others, and in truth they don’t need to. It’s self-evident. Maybe it’s even better at this point if they leave it to the silence of implication.

“It scared me,” the Outsider breathes, and for a split second he has to shift his focus away. Not more fear, and certainly not shame. It’s simply a lot of everything. “When you put your hand on my neck that way, too. Honestly... It did.”

Corvo releases a hard breath. His features seem at once not to move and to contort into a pained grimace. He’s trying to conceal how much hearing that upset him, and he’s not doing a good job.

The Outsider curses silently. Stars, he can be so bad at this.

“I don’t have to do those things again.”

“No. _No_.” He leans in further, squeezes Corvo’s hand tightly enough to crack a couple of the knuckles. “I want you to. It wasn’t that kind of scared, it was—” He shakes his head, abruptly frustrated with himself. How difficult it is to define any of this, and therefore how nearly impossible it is to adequately capture it in words. Once words weren’t things he had to struggle with, and he never felt as though he was cramming far too much meaning into cramped little boxes. “It _all_ scared me. The thing is...”

He trails off into silence and closes his eyes, for a few seconds focuses only on his breathing. This is one of those points at which he needs to let trust take over. Even if he can’t explain himself perfectly, surely Corvo knows him well enough to fill in the gaps. Fuck’s sake, Corvo has _been here before_.

He releases Corvo’s hand and rolls off him, sits up and rakes his hands through his hair. Tips his head back and gazes up at the evening light streaming through the glass. It’s not altogether unlike the light that night. And in the corner of his vision he sees Corvo sitting up too, looking at him with hooded eyes.

_He’s seen you in your worst moments. He knows your dreams. He holds you when you wake up screaming. He already knows all of it. There’s nothing to hide from him anymore._

“Part of me is scared all the time.” The Outsider draws his knees to his chest and hugs them, still gazing upward. “It always has been. With you, that way, it was like I could finally stop fighting it. I knew it couldn’t hurt me. I knew nothing _would_ hurt me. So I could acknowledge it and feel it and just... let it go.” At last he lowers his eyes and returns them to Corvo’s face, gives him a faint and not altogether happy smile. “I always think too much. But you made it so I didn’t have to think at all. I could give everything to you and let myself _feel_ and not worry about anything else.” He rolls a shoulder, a little awkward now. “I’m not explaining this very well, am I?”

“It’s not really an easy thing to explain,” Corvo murmurs, and he reaches out and cups the Outsider’s cheek in his broad, rough palm. The Outsider hums and obediently responds to the pressure, turns his head. “You don’t have to explain all of it. I just need to be sure you’re all right.”

The Outsider nuzzles at his hand. “I’m extremely _all right._ ”

Corvo shifts closer and leans in, a dense shadow swallowing up the world, and his kiss is gentle and deep and it goes on for a long time. The Outsider sighs into it, and here too is a place in which he doesn’t have to think.

“I love you,” Corvo whispers when it’s finally over. “You know that.”

“I do know it. I love you too.” The Outsider lingers for another moment or two, merely basking in the heat and contained power of the body so near to his, then pulls back and scoops the book up. “So is this all you’ve got?”

“Immediately on hand? Yes.” Corvo waves a hand vaguely at the shelves. “I’ve got a couple of others lying around somewhere, I’d have to dig for them. I’ll see how much digging’s involved tomorrow.”

“So what,” the Outsider asks, opening the book again, “are we going to do with them?”

“I told you. Ideas.” Corvo flashes him a bit of a toothy grin. “Inspiration.”

The Outsider snorts. “Oh, it’s inspiring, all right. No, I mean, do you want to make some kind of list?”

“A list?” Corvo barks a quick, surprised laugh. “Like a menu? I hadn’t been thinking along those lines, but... That sounds like as good idea as any. Sure, let’s make a list of things that appeal to you. And make a note of the things that don’t.”

“What about the things that appeal to _you?_ ” The Outsider has returned to the scene with the shackles and canes and multiple participants. The metal shackles and chains, he doesn’t have to think over; he’s definitely not interested at this point in time. Same with the multiple participants. The canes, however, he’s stuck on for some reason. “When do we cover those?”

“As we go,” Corvo says casually, and despite the casual tone all at once there’s a new kind of heat in his voice and his eyes, and the Outsider slowly lays the book down as his pulse picks up a bit of speed. “I think you’ll find that my tastes are... pretty diverse.”

_Diverse_. Suddenly the Outsider’s mouth is dry. There’s a lot going on in that word. There’s something about it which manages to be simultaneously ominous and darkly exciting. Maybe this is all a practice that he should be able to laugh at, but it’s also true that a great deal of it seems to exist in a realm beyond laughter.

His fingers are already working at his shirt when he turns onto his back, stares up at Corvo’s looming form. “Come here and hold me down,” he breathes, and his chest hitches in a sound which is in fact not far from laughter. “Please. _Sir_.”

Corvo chuckles, and slides on top of him and does.

~

The majority of the books Corvo brings him—from obscure corners of the Tower, from rare dealers, from seedy little shops in the less savory parts of the city where books are only one of the more mundane of the wide variety of goods and novelties and _equipment_ on offer, from any number of places—are indeed fairly ridiculous and not, in a purely editorial sense, very good. But some are. Some surprise him with the elegance and beauty of their prose, with the artfulness of even the most explicit descriptions. Many are wildly ludicrous, but others are subtle, direct, and engage with the techniques on display with a kind of depth and whole-heartedness the Outsider can’t help but find compelling.

A lot of it is coming back to him now, as he lies in Corvo’s bed—dressed, undressed, alone and with company, occasionally taking a break with Corvo or all by himself when a book’s contents become particularly _inspiring_. The things he always knew, the things he coolly observed with his abyssal black eyes. The sheer variety of the things people invent to do to and with each other. The sheer range of intensity they seek, for such a vast array of reasons.

Some of it, he finds intriguing. Some of it is alarming—and yet he doesn’t think he can dismiss it outright. Some of it is merely comical. Some of it is clearly downright physically impossible— _I regret to inform you,_ he tells Corvo dryly at one point when they’re looking at something Corvo appears to be enjoying a good deal, _that I cannot bend that way_. And some of it is viscerally off-putting. Some of it is downright disgusting. Fortunately Corvo doesn’t seem remotely interested in activities that fall into the latter two categories.

But then some of it floods quivering, aching heat into him as the images swirl into focus in his head, the characters and faces and voices and hands replaced as he mentally slips himself and Corvo into their places. Being on his knees and being made to crawl, bend, spread and contort into any number of vulnerable and even humiliating positions. The helpless darkness of a blindfold. The different but equal helplessness of a gag in his mouth. The heavy, relentlessly repeated slaps of an open hand on his face but also his ass, his thighs. The angry red stripe he knows even the light impact of a cane would raise. He lingers for a while with wide eyes on a description of a bar strapped to the ankles, which forces the legs apart and makes closing them even involuntarily next to impossible.

Hard dark eyes and a hard cold voice commanding and demanding and threatening and mocking and—and how _exquisite_ must it feel when it’s finally earned—praising. The inexpressible joy of pleasing someone he already wants so badly to please.

How far, in every respect, who he used to be is from who this would make him into. From a nearly omniscient god to something so very much like a slave.

Only not. It’s not that at all.

Because with a single word, he can change everything. With a single word, he can make it stop.

But there are two things he can barely go near. One of them, in fact, he can’t go near at all. Unfortunately, the former shows up an awful lot; he learns to hastily edit it out of anything he wants to imagine himself doing.

The other thing he can’t even look at. He turns inwardly away when it shows up, trying not to shudder. It doesn’t show up that often but now and then it’s there.

Yet on some level he knows they’re waiting for him. Waiting very patiently.

Waiting for him to be ready.  
  



	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Having established some rules, Corvo and the Outsider have their first proper play-date.

Corvo told him he should be able to laugh at this. But now it’s a problem, because now he’s wrestling with a nearly overwhelming urge to break into a peal of giggles.

Corvo must be able to tell. The Outsider is trying gamely to conceal it, but he’s so extraordinarily bad at concealing anything he’s feeling, it’s laughable in and of itself to even try, and as Corvo leaves the Outsider in the armchair and goes to build up the fire, the Outsider finally gives in and his frame is gripped by waves of shaking as he frantically silences himself with his cupped hand.

Although, what is he afraid might happen if he does laugh? Surely Corvo wouldn’t be insulted.

Perhaps he merely doesn’t want to break the mood.

Which is actually a little... _tense_ isn’t quite the word, but it’s not far off. All day his stomach has been wound tight with a kind of nervous, jittery excitement he isn’t used to associating with sex or with Corvo, and it’s been hard to keep himself from entertaining lurid half-fantasies of what disasters they might encounter. What if he does something wrong? Freaks out? What if his body malfunctions in some horrible and embarrassing way? What if a stray coal sets the room on fire? What if there’s suddenly a new and highly localized plague?

He might chalk it up to the fact that they’ve _scheduled_ this and therefore given him a concrete time to be apprehensive about, and no doubt that’s some if it, but it can’t be all. Plenty of times, Corvo has indicated early in the day that he intends to do terrible, delightful things to the Outsider after supper, and gone about his business and left the Outsider to simmer in the anticipation.

It’s that it’s scheduled, and also it’s new and weird and although they’ve technically done it before...

They also essentially haven’t. Not like this. It’s one thing when you trip backwards into it. It’s turning out to be another thing entirely when it’s planned.

He fidgets a little and watches the broad, dark shape of Corvo’s back and head wreathed in flames.

“All right,” Corvo says, sets the poker aside and straightens up and turns. It’s difficult to make out his face clearly—they’ve got the lights low, at least for now—but the Outsider hears a tiny echo of his own nervousness in Corvo’s otherwise low, even voice, and is perversely comforted by it. “Let’s go over it one more time.”

The Outsider swallows and nods. The Rules.

Which are not worrying in and of themselves. Quite the opposite. They’re there, the Outsider grasped immediately, to make everything safe, or at least safer. To make sure there are no nasty surprises. To minimize—although not eliminate—the chances that he’ll have to use the word they’ve decided on.

That either of them will.

Corvo steps towards him, pauses and seems to simply look at him for a moment. Then, with a smooth movement that manages to nevertheless be startling, he drops to one knee in front of the chair. Almost as if he’s about to propose.

Which sets off the threatening inner storm of giggles all over again.

If Corvo notices, he doesn’t indicate it. He lays both big, strong hands on the Outsider’s knees and stares into his eyes, his own gone from deep brown to nearly black and glittering sparks. So many other things in those eyes besides nerves—the fire, and the hunger of it, and the dark power swirling inside him that has nothing to do with his magic and everything to do with the beautiful lethality that’s always been there. The hot seam of violence that might have steered him in a very different direction if he’d allowed it to.

There’s a monster inside Corvo. A very well-controlled and contained monster, but it’s there nonetheless.

“What do you call me?” Corvo says softly, and the Outsider swallows again, his mouth suddenly a bit dry.

“Sir. Only Sir.”

Corvo nods, and the approval in it does something to the Outsider’s core that he recognizes and dives into. Something canine, almost servile: a desperation to have that approval again. He would do anything, anything this man wants, anything to please him.

There’s no special name for the Outsider. There isn’t when they aren’t doing this, and it seems ridiculous to start now. _Boy,_ he supposes, is as close as they’re going to get.

That’s fine.

“What are you not allowed to do?”

“Look you in the eyes,” the Outsider murmurs, and his own eyes immediately drop. He feels like he’s sinking, all the giggles gone. Or—not sinking. He’s putting something on, dressing his mind in something. Dressing for a role. One he believes he’ll play with all the sincerity in the world, but still a role. “Without permission.”

Nod. “What else?”

“Speak, unless I’m spoken to.”

“Or?”

The Outsider’s mouth twitches. This order is one he might eventually have to disobey on purpose, and he imagines they both know it. “Or you’ll gag me.”

“If you break any of these rules?” Corvo asks, his voice a grating hum, and heat rushes south through the Outsider’s core. _Shit,_ he’s hard already. Practically squirming, insanely aware of the weight of Corvo’s hands on his knees and wanting those hands everywhere.

Wanting them to force his legs apart and keep them there.

“You’ll punish me.”

“If you aren’t quick enough to do as I say?”

“You’ll punish me.”

Corvo’s mouth curls into a small and extremely wicked smile. “And if I want to, for any reason of my own?”

The Outsider suppresses a moan. “You’ll punish me,” he manages hoarsely. This, he had to deliberate over, because one of the attractions of this kind of game is its simple orderliness, its rules of action and consequence. Unlike real life, this fantasy can be made predictable. But maybe the Outsider doesn’t want predictable. Maybe he doesn’t want even that level of control. If the premise of this is Corvo Attano as ruthless tyrant, as his own kind of emperor to be absolutely and without question obeyed, then Corvo should also be able to do as he pleases, whatever that might be, no matter how whimsical or capricious.

Within certain limits.

“Tell me the word,” Corvo murmurs, and the Outsider licks almost painfully dry lips.

“Sword.”

This had required even more painstaking deliberation. They could have gone with something obvious—red showed up more than once in the _textbooks_ Corvo produced—but the lack of creativity there was off-putting. More than that, the Outsider felt and finally came up with a way to say: this is _theirs,_ their game, only for them and only between them, and using someone else’s word just seemed wrong. So what, then? Something totally outside anything he might say in the flush of the moment. Any random thing? Or something with symbolism and meaning?

What is Corvo? With what does the Outsider identify him? A lover and a protector, a friend, a savior of sorts, a father, and most fundamentally, a good man. In the context of the semi-fiction they’re currently weaving between them, a master.

There’s also the Mark. But he won’t go near that. Not for this.

What is Corvo? When everything else is stripped away, what is the central feature of his essence?

Corvo Attano is a weapon. An elegant blade cutting through everything, striking home and never missing its target.

At a moment when the boundaries break and it’s too much to bear, in extremis, that’s what the Outsider will invoke.

“What if you can’t speak?”

“Three taps. Or squeezes,” the Outsider says dreamily. “Depending.”

“Good.” Corvo’s hands vanish from the Outsider’s knees and reappear framing his face as he leans in and kisses him—so carefully, so gentle. The message is unspoken but clear: _You are precious to me. You will come to no harm at these hands._ “I love you.”

The Outsider doesn’t move. He’s not altogether certain he can.

But then Corvo is pushing back and standing, and he’s taken on that imperious air he had before. He’s no longer in the presence of his lover and companion but instead a servant, albeit a favorite one. Perhaps even less than that.

A toy.

“Strip.”

It takes him a moment to process the command. A moment—and then there’s a stab of fear, because very possibly this will count as not obeying quickly enough, and while he was virtually certain punishment would be forthcoming at some point, he isn’t sure he wants it so soon. But Corvo’s back is to him as he strides across to the sideboard and the decanters of fine brandy and whiskey waiting there, and the Outsider scrambles to his feet, going to work on his buttons with trembling fingers.

Once again, Corvo clearly isn’t all that interested in this being a show. He still isn’t even looking, seemingly focused on selecting whiskey over brandy and filling the glass. But the Outsider is looking at _him_ as he sheds his shirt and starts in on his boots and trousers, and it feels as if the better part of his energy is going into that focus. Undressing, he can do on autopilot. All he can see is Corvo.

Corvo, turning and coming back to him, glass in hand, that imperious affect firmly in place. He barely spares the Outsider a glance as he passes him, going to the other of the two armchairs and sinking into it with a contented sigh, his gaze directed toward the fire rather than the boy a few feet away who is rapidly transitioning from semi-dressed to fully naked.

A strange desperation is creeping into the Outsider’s gut— _notice me, notice me, notice me._ But he won’t do anything to get Corvo’s attention. He hasn’t been instructed to, and doing more than he’s been instructed strikes him as decidedly hazardous. He merely kicks away his trousers and smallclothes and stands there, head slightly bowed and eyes down, resisting the unusual urge to cover his partially erect cock with his hands.

Corvo shifts, appearing to be suddenly reminded of his presence. He tosses the Outsider a vaguely interested look and raises a hand, languidly beckons. “Come here. No,” he adds sharply, as the Outsider steps forward. “Don’t walk. Get on your knees and crawl.”

No hesitation this time. He’s still processing it, gripped by a more intense shiver than any he’s felt so far, when his knees hit the floor and his hands follow.

But he’s not so mindless that he isn’t thinking about it, as he slowly makes his way forward, focusing on nothing but the swirling abstract pattern of the carpet passing hypnotically under him and the gleaming leather of Corvo’s boots just ahead. Thinking about another side of this, beyond the loss of control and the constant threat of pain; a thing which he’s felt before, which he felt when Corvo streaked his face with come. That he’s being _degraded,_ and that degradation is something he’s known far too well in his time. What it feels like to be treated as a god and also as something less than human. Worthy of nothing.

Yet somehow in this moment he feels no less precious for all of that, no less cared for. Somehow, in a kind of alchemy nearly too surreal to be credited, even this command feels like an expression of love.

Because it is. Because it’s for Corvo, but even more it’s for him.

He stops at Corvo’s feet and remains as he is, dropped forward onto his elbows, trembling slightly. Waiting. Waiting for the hand that now descends and settles on the crown of his head, and gives him an indulgently affectionate stroke.

_Good boy._

“Stand up,” Corvo says quietly, and he does.

For another silent moment and a sip of whiskey, Corvo leaves him waiting, and the waiting presses down on his skin along with the pressure of Corvo’s gaze as it moves slowly over his body. He can’t see it, his eyes still downcast and a bit unfocused, but like always he can sense it, and the unusually keen scrutiny in it. He’s being examined, albeit not touched. Inspected.

“Turn around.”

Swaying a little—it might be going so quickly from his hands and knees to his feet that’s making him so lightheaded or it might be something else altogether—he does, and faces the dimness of the room, the shadows collecting around the bed, the firelight dancing on the walls. The warm friction of the hand caressing the slope of his ass, and his breath catches and he only just stops himself from stiffening. He’s fairly certain Corvo wouldn’t like that.

Or perhaps he would. What does like even mean now?

That caressing hand halts and takes hold of one cheek, squeezes the packed muscle. One thing Corvo unreservedly likes is the Outsider’s ass, on a number of different levels, but this is a grope unlike any before it. Proprietary far more than hungry. There’s very little heat in it. Once more, the Outsider is being evaluated, like an animal Corvo is deliberating over buying.

For some imminent purpose?

“I can touch you however I want. Every part of you belongs to me.” Corvo’s thick fingers are wandering, nosing into the cleft. Dry, and not pressing or circling in the way that can slowly unravel nerves, but the potential is there, nearly a promise, and the Outsider swallows a whimper. Nods.

Compared to everything else that might happen to him here, it seems like a crude thing to want to be simply fucked, but he wants it. Oh, he does.

“I’m going to make sure you understand what that means,” Corvo continues, his tone a strange and strangely hypnotizing mix of cool amusement and cold threat and promise humming with power. “ _All_ of what it means. I can give you pain until you can’t bear it. And—” Corvo gives the side of the Outsider’s ass a single brisk slap, an order to turn once again which is immediately obeyed. “—I can give you more pleasure than you can stand. I can join the two in a thousand different combinations, as it pleases me.” He cocks his head, eyeing the Outsider like a speculative graying crow as he swirls the whiskey in the glass. “What would please me most right now?”

The Outsider swallows, recognizing this as a rhetorical question—and the muscles in his throat catch and seize and quiver as Corvo reaches between his legs and wraps sure fingers around the base of his cock.

The erection of which has proceeded a good way beyond _partially_.

The quiver spreads from his throat all down and through him, a vibration rippling along his spine, and he chews at his lower lip and whimpers as Corvo gives him a slow stroke, glides back down to toy with his balls. He’d wondered how this was going to go, which approach Corvo was going to take with him—doing something to him, or ordering him to perform some service. Now that it seems to be heading this way—to the extent that he can think coherently—he finds that he’s not surprised. Because of the care in it, the focus on him that hadn’t really been there the first time.

In some ways this is more difficult. Corvo’s touch is like a spotlight burning into him. He feels ten times as naked now.

“It isn’t just how I touch you. Like I told you, it’s how you obey.” Corvo releases him, so abruptly that he’s almost dizzy, and pushes to his feet, nodding across the room at the desk. “Go over there. Move.”

But the Outsider hesitates, uncertain—because does he walk? Does he crawl? It hasn’t been made explicit. What assumption is safe? Once he’s been instructed to do something a certain way, does that hold every time until the instruction changes? This is a line of logic that he hadn’t anticipated being a problem and it’s spinning him into a kind of frozen panic, which breaks into a yelp of bright pain as Corvo whips his hand back and slaps the side of the Outsider’s left thigh.

“I said _move_.”

Definite threat in his tone—in his eyes, which, when the Outsider chances a glance at them, have gone stormy. This is only a taste. Worse will surely follow, perhaps much worse. The Outsider whimpers again, half in the lingering sting of the impact and half in fear, and abandons all deliberation about _how_ Corvo wants him to move; he scrambles backward, still on his feet, and Corvo slowly advances on him until his ass collides with the smooth beveled wood.

If that was the wrong way to do it, well, he’ll just have to take the consequences.

But they don’t appear to be forthcoming. Corvo stops in front of him, so close the Outsider’s skin is bathed in the delicious heat of him, and splays a hand against his chest, giving him a light push.

“Get up on it. Sit.”

The Outsider blinks at him, nonplussed. Obeys.

Corvo is already moving away, around the side of the desk to retrieve the chair there; the Outsider is just finished situating himself, barely managing to catch a glass paperweight before it rolls onto the floor and feeling rather proud of his deftness, when Corvo sets the chair down in front of him and sinks into it.

Leans forward, and lays his hands on the Outsider’s knees. Applies gentle pressure. The direction is unspoken but perfectly clear, and the Outsider pulls in a shaking breath and spreads his thighs.

Corvo lightly slaps the inside of the right one. “Scoot forward.”

The Outsider obeys, gazes down at him and only barely avoids meeting his eyes. He draws another trembling breath; once more he feels so exposed like this, set up practically on display, and Corvo’s face is very close to his cock. He’s getting a distinct sense of what Corvomight be intending to do, at least the outlines of it, and it’s all he can do to keep his hips from rolling.

Then Corvo takes hold of him again and he can’t help it.

Corvo smiles. It’s a mischievous smile, and it does not reassure.

“Let’s play a game,” he murmurs, his fingertips easing up the Outsider’s shaft to tug lightly at the stretched ring of his foreskin. He licks his lips. “I’ll suck you off, just the way I know you like it best.” Teeth flicker inside his smile. “You know how good I can make you feel.”

Not clear that he’s looking for a response. But the Outsider gives him an unsteady nod.

“I’ll make you feel that good,” Corvo goes on. “Just because I want to. Because I like you.” He laughs softly. “But there’s a condition.” He pauses, wearing that beautiful worrying smile, slicking his forefinger with the precome welling at the Outsider’s slit. “You can’t move. You can’t make a sound. I mean it.” He raises his hand and presses his shining fingertip between the Outsider’s lips, and the Outsider parts them to accept the taste of himself, the tangy salt of it. “Not one fucking fraction of an inch. And I don’t want to even hear you _breathe_.”

The Outsider stares at him—yet again at the very last minute avoiding his eyes. Corvo’s finger is still heavy and salty on his tongue.

_That’s impossible._ He doesn’t say it. But it must be explicit in his expression. _That is absolutely impossible, have you gone completely mad._

“I think you can do it,” Corvo says with silky good cheer. “I have faith in you. If it turns out you can’t...” He shrugs. “My advice is that you don’t let me down.”

He doesn’t wait for further protest, even a silent one. He withdraws his hand, sets his palms against the tops of the Outsider’s thighs, ducks his head and the Outsider is sliding fast into hot, wet paradise.

It’s almost over before it begins. The Outsider knows even as he wrestles back his moan and every muscle goes rigid with sheer effort that he won’t be able to maintain control, that Corvo has set him up to fail, and as Corvo gives him a long, lazy swipe of tongue up the underside of his cock, he wants to laugh as much as anything else. He’s going to be punished. Corvo has planned to provide himself with an excuse to do it—although he wouldn’t have needed one. There’s no way out of it, he’s going to fail and Corvo is going to punish him, and the prankishness of it is just so _funny_.

It’s also _mean_. It’s so mean and so unfair, Corvo working him with such slow, effortless motions of lips and tongue. It wasn’t an exaggeration; Corvo is more than capable of pushing every one of his buttons with astonishing ease and has been since the beginning, as if he went into this already knowing the physiology. Exactly how to flick and swirl, exactly how to tighten his fist at the base, how to lap at the head, how to apply the perfect amount of suction. He’s working as if he has all damn night, which he does, and it’s a total affectation, because he must know that the Outsider isn’t going to be able to take it for more than another minute or two at the most. The Outsider sits, head tilted back and eyes squeezed shut and jaw clenched, every muscle wound like a spring about to break, lungs burning with the breath he’s too frightened to release, his fingers hooked and nails digging so hard into the blotter that later he’ll see he’s left significant dents.

_Corvo,_ he shrieks silently. _Fuck you, Corvo, you trollish asshole, you fucking bastard, you couldn’t even give me a chance, couldn’t even give me a chance to win._

_You monstrous, beautiful, wonderful man._

He breaks. Tiny, maybe imperceptible to someone less perceptive, but he does. Convo takes him _deep,_ deeper even than usual, so deep he feels himself nudging into Corvo’s throat, and he can’t help it. The tiniest of twitches, the softest of whines, and Corvo freezes and the Outsider knows he’s screwed.

And it’s actually a relief. Now he gets to let go and take whatever is coming to him.

With slow deliberation, Corvo pulls away and sits back in the chair, wiping his swollen lips on the back of his hand. His expression is impassive—on the surface.

Beneath that flat veneer, he’s delighted.

“I ask you to do one simple thing for me,” he says, his voice very low and very dangerous,“and you don’t. Not even when I’m doing something nice for you.” He shakes his head, and the exasperated dissatisfaction in the movement is so obviously feigned, the Outsider wouldn’t need to discern the delight in him to know that, but all the same, the urge to drop to his knees and beg for forgiveness—for reasons totally beyond fear of punishment—is nearly overwhelming.

All he wanted was to satisfy this man and he’s failed, and he’ll do or endure whatever it takes to make it right.

“All right.” Smoothly and all at once Corvo is on his feet and shoving the chair aside, fingers working at the catch of his belt. “Since apparently I’m finished with making you feel good.” He waves a brusque hand. “On your feet. Turn around and bend over the desk.”

The belt. Corvo’s hands. The look on his face. The cues are all here. They have been from the beginning. He should have known the second he walked into the room that this was how it was always going to go. The Outsider levers himself off the desk and turns, trembling, braces himself against the desk and bends.

He knew what was coming before and he knows what’s coming now, and he’s already baring his teeth and tightened for the blow when the belt whistles through the air and smacks into the meat of his ass.

The pain was bright before. It’s incandescent now, a brilliant flare at the edges of his vision, and he cries out and flinches even as the second blow lands. He might have thought Corvo would start light and build intensity from there, but that’s not the approach he’s taken, although the Outsider can tell, beneath the shock of the first sting, that Corvo is still only using a fraction of the force he could employ.

Another crack, a flash at the edges of his eyes, and the Outsider once more digs his nails into the desk and moans hectically—as the brilliance of the pain thrums into heat and begins to spread through him in liquid waves.

Like the pleasure did. The heady thickness of the sensation flooding through his nerves. There was pain the first time he and Corvo played this game but it was nothing like this, hitting him over and over in those successive waves like rocks being dropped into a pond, the belt licking across his skin like a flame and burning stripes laid out all up and down his ass and upper thighs. It washes over him with those waves, what’s happening to him, and he suddenly seems to perceive himself as an observer standing back and watching a grotesque scene of aristocratic decadence: a naked, shivering, gasping boy taking a beating from a sadistic tormenter easily three times his age.

Dimly, he marvels: Sometimes literally _nothing_ is what it appears to be.

“This isn’t anything close to the worst I could do to you,” Corvo notes without pausing his steady assault. “This isn’t anything close to the worst I _will_ do. Do you know why?”

All at once the blows stop and the Outsider senses him very near, and he flinches again and whimpers as Corvo’s hand passes across his abused skin. His brain moves sluggishly, confused. Was that a question he’s expected to answer? What kind of answer is desired of him?

What will please Corvo?

“Do you?” Corvo asks again, very softly, and the Outsider fumbles for anything that seems to fit, spots something in the general disorder of his brain and lunges for it.

“Because it pleases you.” He manages to swallow, although he doesn’t have much spit to swallow with. His cheeks are itchy with tears. “Sir.”

“That’s right.” The hand on him gives him an approving stroke and the bone-deep pleasure of that approval takes his breath away. “Good boy.” He steps back and the belt buckle’s _clink_ pierces the air. “But I’m not done with your lesson yet.”

It takes another four blows for the Outsider to realize he’s still hard.

Not in half measures. The tip of the belt licks sharply near the apex of his thighs and he jumps, lets out a high-pitched yelp that might normally embarrass him—and is suddenly and immensely aware of that part of himself, the blood thrumming there every bit as fierce and hot as in any of the welts he knows must be rising on his skin. He’s so hard he’s aching, an entirely separate and blunter species of pain, and he arches under Corvo’s next blow and groans, his hips rocking against nothing.

It’s insane. It’s insane to react this way. He’s had plenty of time to come to terms with the fact that, for whatever reason of nurture or nature, he’s apparently one of those people who finds this sort of thing appealing, but the reality of it still washes over him all at once, mildly stunning. He’s being _hurt,_ and he’s been hurt so many times in so many ways in his long, short, bizarre life, and yet this time his body is unfurling and soaking it in like sunshine, the warmth of the welts and the heat in his cock joining and mingling and flowing all through him into something so exquisitely...

Calm.

As before. So calm.

Because he’s already doing everything that’s desired of him. Because he’s performing perfectly. Because he doesn’t have to think or worry about anything; all he has to do is open to this, accept it without resistance and without holding back—be Corvo’s plaything and pet and slave, and trust in what he knows in his very marrow, which is that no matter what happens, he’ll be protected.

He groans again and with trembling, weirdly loose muscles, he pushes back off the desk and meets the next blows.

Which is of course when they stop.

It’s so sudden that his knees nearly buckle, and he’s grateful that the desk is still there to catch him. Then a hand is on him, gripping the back of his neck and shoving him roughly down flat, his cheek jammed against a small pile of City Watch reports.

He wants to laugh. If they had any idea what their reports are witness to now.

With his other hand, Corvo is once more stroking over the welts, tracing them—not with any particular affection. That sense of evaluation is back; Corvo is examining his own work, judging its quality.

A light slap on the Outsider’s ass—really very light by comparison to what was happening to him barely seconds before—and a little cry breaks out of him as he flinches.

Corvo laughs. It’s a good laugh. It’s the kind of laugh the Outsider loves to hear him make.

“Well done.” By the _Void,_ he can’t imagine ever hearing enough of that. “I thought you could take it. But it’s good to be sure.” Corvo’s hand is wandering now, even as his other continues to pin the Outsider to the desk; around the side of his hip and down, past his lower belly, until Corvo’s fingers skate along his shaft and curl against it.

The Outsider’s shiver when Corvo squeezes him is deep and violent.

“What have we here.” Mild surprise, and there’s also irritation in it, and neither are genuine. Corvo knew exactly what he was going to find. At the very least hoped for it. “That was supposed to be punishment. Don’t tell me you _enjoyed_ it.”

The Outsider only whimpers.

One wouldn’t imagine that it would be possible to stroke someone’s cock thoughtfully, and yet Corvo manages it. Corvo is capable of many scarcely believable things. “I can see it’s going to be more difficult to handle you than I thought,” he murmurs. “I’ll have to get more creative. Although honestly,” he adds musingly, giving the Outsider a crueler squeeze, “I’m very interested to see how much you can stand.”

_Oh,_ the Outsider thinks with a peal of silent and slightly hysterical laughter, _so am I. Believe me, dear Corvo, I too am_ very _interested to find that out._

“In the meantime.”

The grip on the back of his neck is abruptly a vise snapping shut, so hard and merciless it no longer feels human, and the Outsider yelps and twists, a few seconds of instinctive struggling before he remembers himself and lets go, shakes under the pain. Corvo is releasing his cock and seizing one arm, wrenching it high behind his back, yanking him up and away from the desk and flinging him toward the floor. Even if he was less startled, there’s too much force behind it; the Outsider goes sprawling, the carpet burning against his right hip and elbow, more bright pain shooting up from his tailbone where it lands.

Again: the sheer awesome power of Corvo Attano. Once in the Void the Outsider could have crushed his bones inside his body with a thought, or torn him to pieces without killing him and left him to drift for eternity. Now all he can do—all he wants to do—is release everything in thrall to that power and feel the safety that rests inside it.

Which doesn’t deaden the fear that grips him like Corvo’s hand when he pushes himself up on one arm and turns over, gazes at the looming darkness in the shape of a man stalking toward him.

What’s going to happen to him now? What other punishment does Corvo intend to deal out?

“I could think of more effective ways to make you feel pain,” Corvo says, his voice icily casual. “I will. Some other time. For now, watching you take it like that...” He lowers one hand and palms and kneads himself slowly through his trousers, the other reaching into a pocket of his waistcoat and withdrawing a small stoppered glass bottle. The liquid inside glistens clear in the firelight, and the Outsider knows instantly what it is and what it’s going to be used for.

Haven’t they used it plenty of times before now?

“You’re lovely when you’re suffering.” Corvo’s voice is a husky rasp. The lust in it is unmistakable. Delightful. His fingers work rapidly at his fly, sliding inside. “You’re lovely anytime, but especially then. I almost threw the belt away, took you right there. Which I will.” He draws himself out, thick and flushed dark in his fist, and strokes himself, his eyelids fluttering ever so slightly. “I’ll take what’s mine anywhere I want to.”

The Outsider stares up at him, motionless. Entranced. His ass and thighs are still on fire, the roughness of the carpet against his skin a kind of torture all on its own, but the pain is distant and unimportant in the presence of the man towering over him, all fire and shadow, stroking his cock and fixing the boy lying under him with blackly smoldering eyes.

“Turn over.” Corvo nudges his thigh with the toe of his boot, and it isn’t gentle. “Get your ass in the air.”

The Outsider flips onto his belly, grits his teeth against the fresh rugburn. It feels as if the top layer of the skin of his ass and thighs has been stripped off, the tissue beneath it raw and agonizingly vulnerable. All of him feels so vulnerable, as he curves his spine and pushes up on his knees, spreading his legs without having to give it a second’s thought. What he is thinking about is his cock, which—incredibly—still hasn’t softened.

He silently mouths Corvo’s name. Prays Corvo didn’t glimpse his lips moving.

The shuffling sound of Corvo lowering to kneel behind him, the hot flare of a hand once more on his ass and dry fingers sliding between his cheeks. He tenses, winces, and although he’s reasonably certain—in a way he couldn’t quite explain—that Corvo won’t force his way in, won’t hurt him like _that,_ his fear locks onto the vivid idea that he might, what agony that would be, and he fights to keep himself from pleading.

But he wants Corvo inside him. He wants it so bad he could scream.

Corvo withdraws his hand and returns it seconds later, his fingers slicked. The apprehension melts and the Outsider sighs at the warm, slippery contact, the glide and circle of Corvo’s fingertip around his asshole. Instead of tensing, he loosens in the way that’s second nature to him by now, pushes back a little and moans.

Corvo chuckles—and pushes, and while the slickness and the Outsider’s relaxation keeps it from being outright painful, it’s still sudden, surprises his body, and burns. The moan twists in his throat, and Corvo doesn’t relent. He pulls back and then pushes deeper, and the sound that escapes the Outsider is broken and strained.

“You want this too. Don’t pretend you don’t.” Another rich chuckle, and Corvo turns his finger from side to side, curling it downward. “This isn’t punishment. If anything I’m showing you favor you don’t deserve, you slut. I shouldn’t bother with easing you into it.” His finger thrusts past the final knuckle and all the way in, and as it brushes against that place deep inside that always sends pleasure sparkling through the Outsider’s nerves, the sudden pain is subsumed as quickly as it came. “I should just fuck you now. Tear your pretty ass apart.”

Movement again, and the dense heat of Corvo’s body over the Outsider’s back. Blunt nails hooked cruelly into his hip. The burning stretch of a second oiled finger joining the first, and the Outsider whines and silently beats back the instinctive panic in his core.

_Relax. Relax. It’ll be bad if you don’t relax._

_It can be very good if you do._

He does as he’s learned to do, pushes back against the intrusion, and it’s easier. But Corvo’s fingers are thick and merciless, scissoring and working him open.

“I’m going to train you,” Corvo purrs. “I’m going to train you to be ready for me any time I want to use you. It shouldn’t be too difficult. You’ve already showed me you love it, you dirty little whore.”

The insults are hot and honey-smooth and they pour through the Outsider’s veins and down between his legs. He still doesn’t understand this, doesn’t comprehend why he _likes_ it so much, but he’s hoping for what Corvo breathes next.

“Say it. Tell me you’re my dirty whore.”

“I’m your dirty whore,” the Outsider grates, and the words sound slurred and loggy in his own ears, as if his mouth isn’t working properly. Familiar. He found it funny before, repeating the words. Now he seems to have skipped that stage, and all it does is churn his arousal into a storm, his hips rolling as Corvo fucks two fingers into him.

“Tell me you can’t get enough cock. Tell me you want your holes stuffed with it.”

“I can’t—” The Outsider swallows shakily. “I can’t get enough cock. I want my holes stuffed with it.” He pauses, and the inspiration is as hot and smooth as the pleasure. “Sir.”

“Well, now. I can’t exactly turn that down.”

Corvo’s fingers are abruptly gone and then he’s being gripped by the hip and held in place as Corvo thrusts into him, all at once and to the hilt, and the Outsider spasms and muffles his scream in the carpet, because it _does_ hurt, only for a few seconds but by every turning sphere, it does.

And Corvo is letting out a throaty laugh, his other hand clamping down once more on the back of the Outsider’s neck, pinning him to the floor and immediately starting to move in sharp, fast pumps. Not slow, not gentle, not even with the kind of easy firmness with which he sometimes begins before the Outsider’s body is fully adjusted to him. He’s fucking the Outsider like he’s _angry,_ like it _is_ a punishment—certainly like the Outsider’s pleasure is no concern of his.

Yet there is pleasure, and with it waves of pain: the smack of a palm on his tender skin, the burn of the carpet against his cheek, the exaggerated curve of his spine exaggerated still more when Corvo grips him and yanks his ass higher even as he pushes down harder, and the Outsider shudders and mewls beneath the man using him, impaling him over and over in time with his harsh grunts.

His face is turned toward the fire. With one usable eye, he stares at it, unfocused, the world a pulsing red and gold blur. It’s like more fluid warmly flowing into him, and he breathes under Corvo’s assault and feels his cock bobbing heavy between his thighs.

He doesn’t have to worry. He doesn’t have to think. All he has to do is take what’s being given to him.

Really a very easy job in the end.

The hand on the back of his neck vanishes, and before he can wonder what other task Corvo has in mind for it, Corvo is releasing him and shifting forward over him, braced above the slope of his back, and reaching around and under and skimming his fingertips up the Outsider’s swaying shaft to the head. There he pauses, although the snap of his hips maintains its steady rhythm, and makes a low, pleased sound.

“Knew you loved it,” he pants. “Didn’t know you’d love it quite this much.”

_He’s not pretending there. That was all him, really him._ Is that faint relief in Corvo’s voice? Has something been confirmed for him? The Outsider’s lips curve into a weak smile, and then Corvo’s wet fingers are once again pushing between and past them and onto his tongue. Without a second’s hesitation he opens to this new invasion, sucks eagerly. Corvo pushes in further, nearly to the point of making him gag, withdraws, thrusts—fucking his mouth with the same rhythm as his ass.

And the image comes to him like a blow through his eyes, sudden and complete and vivid as a hallucination, and he seems to see it silhouetted in the firelight, as if he’s catching a fragment of an impossible world.

Corvo’s unmistakable shape, bent over a smaller and mostly prone form and driving into it. And then Corvo again, twinned and kneeling opposite, grasping the sides of the form’s head and lifting it into his lap. The thick jut of his cock, accepted. Swallowed. Swallowed again and again with every hard thrust.

“You’d take it in both holes at once if you could, wouldn’t you,” Corvo growls. “If I called some guards in here to share you. How many could you stand before you begged for it to stop?” He bends lower, breath hot in the Outsider’s ear—and stuttering ragged in the way that always signals that he’s nearing his climax. “Maybe I’ll find out.”

He doesn’t mean it. Neither of them would want that; it isn’t even a question. But the fantasy sweeps in again, spun into deeper saturation and greater solidity with Corvo’s words: Men all around him, big and powerful and grinning with their huge cocks worked in their fists, crowding in, jostling to get at him, and nothing he can do but enjoy however they decide to play with him.

_Corvo_. Corvo groaning, his lower body pistoning, his size and strength enough to fill the world, blasting heat like the fire, and the boy he’s taken as his own lying under his power and shaking bucking, a broken shout tearing out of him as all his control slips away and he comes without being touched at all, his orgasm fucked out as Corvo arches and snarls and pours into him.

Dimly, even as the whitecaps of it crash against his rocks, it occurs to him that he’s just broken a rule, and an extremely important one, taken his pleasure before being given permission. But he can’t help it, can’t help the minor mess he’s leaving on the carpet, twitching with the aftershocks as Corvo’s body grows loose and heavy on his, mouth partly open against his shoulder in something not far from a kiss with a hint of teeth.

And it’s so sweet. It’s every bit as sweet as he could have ever dreamed.

The pain hasn’t left him, although it’s dulled, and it flares when Corvo pulls out of him—fingers and cock—and gives him a shove beneath his side, sending him tipping onto his back. He lies there, staring up at the dark sky through the glass, smears of semen from his softening cock cool on his lower belly.

Corvo sucks air through his teeth, and in the lower third of his field of vision the Outsider sees him shaking his head.

“I didn’t say you could,” he says, very quietly. A rustle of fabric; he’s tucking himself briskly back into his fly, as if they’ve merely concluded a mundane piece of business, and the Outsider is aware all over again of how naked he is and how naked Corvo isn’t. “You _know_ you’re not allowed to do that unless I say so.”

The sound of his palm whipping against the Outsider’s thigh cuts through the air like a shot, so sudden that for a split second the Outsider doesn’t even feel the pain. Then he does and writhes, groping mindlessly at the point of impact, sobbing as stinging tears flood his eyes.

What in the Void is the back of his entire lower body going to look like tomorrow?

“Come here.”

Corvo doesn’t wait for him to obey; he reaches out, astonishingly quick, and seizes the Outsider by the hair, dragging him up to sit. The Outsider sobs again, fumbling at his head, and Corvo swats his hands away. The grip on his hair mercifully disappears, only to return to the back of his neck, pushing him over and down face-first beside one of the larger splashes of come on the floor.

Shoving his face in what he’s done as if he’s a badly-behaved hound.

With a final shove, Corvo releases him. “Lick it up.”

It’s not disgust that makes him hesitate when he raises his head. It’s not quite shock, either, but it might be in the same general vicinity. This certainly isn’t anything significantly more extreme than anything else Corvo has demanded he do—but somehow it is, the sheer humiliation of it, and his face burns as he bends to the carpet and extends his tongue.

It’s not pleasant. Cooling the way it is, the bitterness is more prominent than his usual experience of this particular substance. But he feels Corvo’s gaze scorching into his back, creeping like low flames across his welted skin, and he doesn’t balk. Worse will happen to him if he doesn’t obey to Corvo’s satisfaction—

But also, Corvo’s satisfaction seems to him to be far more than worth the unpleasantness. If his transgression is forgiven. If Corvo strokes him and murmurs what the Outsider is growing to yearn to hear.

_Good boy._

He tongues up the last fleck and stops, hunched low on his hands and knees, waiting as his blood roars in his ears.

Hand on his head. He tenses for those cruelly gripping fingers—but they only comb easily into his hair, smoothing the mussed strands vaguely back into place.

“Good boy,” Corvo says, soft, and ever so gently he takes the Outsider by the shoulders and tugs him backward, draws him in to curl into the bowl of Corvo’s folded legs.

For a surreal instant the Outsider thinks he might actually burst into tears.

Not from pain, not from humiliation or fear, but simply because of the overwhelming fact of _everything,_ because this is what he wanted more than anything, and he had to earn it and he has. He didn’t _really_ have to earn it, of course. Corvo would do this for him anytime. Corvo did it with him that first night in the pavilion, when the Outsider broke open and kissed him and fell dreamlessly and mercifully asleep in his arms.

Nevertheless. It has been earned.

Corvo says nothing else for a few moments. His hands continue their slow passage from the Outsider’s hair down his shoulders and upper arms to his side and hip, and back up. The Outsider settles his head on Corvo’s thigh and tucks his legs against his middle, a tight ball almost as if he feels the need to defend himself even though he feels nothing of the kind. Tight ball or not, every one of his muscles is relaxing, his body loose and a new gentler warmth seeping through his skin into his bones from Corvo’s big rough hands.

The fire is burning low. The lamps are low as well. The Outsider’s eyes slip half closed. For the first time he’s feeling how genuinely tired he is. Perhaps he could even sleep here like this. Perhaps that would be nice.

Perhaps that would be perfect.

“That’s a good boy,” Corvo breathes again, and the Outsider sighs. The sensation of this session of the game coming to a close is clear and present, but it’s not a thing that should end abruptly. Corvo is bringing him gradually out of it, as if rising with him through dark water. “You did so well.” Fingers tracing the Outsider’s jaw, his cheekbone, and the Outsider nuzzles into the touch with another sigh as a delightful shiver races through him. The abuse first, and then the praise, oh, the _praise,_ it’s sublime. “I’m so proud of you.”

The Outsider’s lips move. He can’t help it. But it’s all right; he knows he won’t be subject to punishment now.

_Corvo._

Another stretch of silence and unhurried caresses. Then Corvo is shifting, sitting the Outsider up, sliding an arm under his shoulders and another beneath his knees. Lifting him and straightening with a grunt and carrying him toward what turns out to be the bed. Laying him gently down on his side. Soft pillows and softer sheets—but Corvo doesn’t pull the covers over him. The Outsider turns his head and peers blearily at Corvo’s shadowy receding form, listens to him rummaging in the chest at the foot of the bed.

Returning. The mattress dips as he sits, and he cups the Outsider’s hipbone, applying slight pressure. “Turn onto your stomach.”

A command. But not a command like he delivered before. It’s one the Outsider is more than content to obey, and he rolls, folding his arms beneath the pillow. His eyelids are so heavy. He believes he could probably be asleep in seconds if he’s left to his own devices.

Then he jumps and hisses as something cool is deposited onto one ass cheek and spread. At first it’s merely the surprise of the temperature, but then his skin is freshly burning and he winces and presses his face into the pillow.

He knows what it is, naturally. Likely the salve has a numbing property. Or he’ll hope so.

But as the burn eases into tingling, he realizes that he does want to keep feeling it. At least a little, at least for a while. He wants to feel it, and be reminded and remember why he feels that way.

“Easy,” Corvo murmurs. “It’ll be better in a few minutes.”

“Alrea’y is.” Still that slur in his words, the consonants all mushy. It takes a bit of effort to speak at all. By all the stars, he’s so pleasantly tired. “Keep going.”

“I was planning to.” He can hear Corvo’s smile. A short pause, then: “Are you all right?”

The Outsider nods, as best he can with most of his face embedded in a pillow. He’s extremely all right. He’s exhausted and in pain, his knees are definitely rugburned and his hips and elbows feel as if they might be as well, and when he licks his lips he can still just barely taste his own come, and he thinks he might be as all right as he ever has been.

“We should talk later,” Corvo says quietly, leaning closer and going to work on the backs of the Outsider’s thighs. “When you’re ready.”

“Wha’bout?”

“How we did. What you liked. What you’d do differently next time. What you’d have me do differently, more than anything.”

The Outsider breaths a laugh. Right now, even beginning to take that kind of stock of what’s happened strikes him as utterly preposterous. It all just happened. It was like a tsunami rushing over him, irresistible and inevitable. Why would his opinion about it ever matter? Why should he even _have_ one?

But he understands that it does matter. When his brain is working again, it’s plausible that he can manage it.

Corvo concludes the application of the salve, and the Outsider watches him set the little jar on the bedside table, bend over and start to pull off his boots. The rest of his clothes follow, and in how Corvo moves, the Outsider can sleepily discern his own kind of weariness. Not remotely surprising. In his way, Corvo was almost certainly working as hard as the Outsider was.

This is work, the Outsider muses as Corvo slides naked into bed beside him and pulls the covers over them both, gathers the Outsider into his arms. A significant part of the appeal is how, when he’s fully absorbed in it, thinking and worrying become completely unnecessary. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t still an effort. It comes to him again that this is a kind of intensely private dramaturgy, both of them simultaneously removing masks and putting them on, shedding roles and playing new ones. That requires concentration.

He suspected but he’s positive now: he won’t want this every time they’re together. He may not even want it frequently. Just as sometimes he doesn’t want much in the way of foreplay, only for Corvo to throw him down and work him open and fuck him good and hard.

There are so many different forms of simplicity.

Corvo’s lips graze the Outsider’s brow. The Outsider hums and snuggles against him. “I love you, you know,” Corvo whispers. “I love you so much.”

“I do know.” He succeeds in clearly enunciating the words. For the most part. Although they’re muffled in the hollow of Corvo’s throat. “I love you too.” He pauses, hesitates. Corvo said they would talk about this later, but the question is still compelling itself. “How was I?”

“I told you.” Corvo laughs softly. “You were good. You were perfect.”

“That can’t be true.”

Corvo shrugs. “I can’t prove it to you. You just have to trust me.”

_Trust_. Trust, to give his body totally over to Corvo’s whims, to place himself wholly and literally in Corvo’s hands. Trust that he’ll be cared for. Trust that even in the midst of the cruelest torment, he’ll be protected.

It was never in question, whether he could do that.

“I trust you,” he breathes.

_I trust you more than I’ve ever trusted anyone in any of my lives._   
  



End file.
